 Guys, welcome to Passion Projects. This is the third talk in our series. I'm really excited to have all of you here. And so underneath your seat, everyone has a note card unless you're not sitting in a seat or you're on the couches. In that case, you don't get to ask questions. Just kidding. That's not really that funny. So what we're going to do, kind of the format of the talk, if you've never been to one of these before, Timony is going to come up here and give the best talk ever. And then, no pressure. And then we're going to have a short break. And then we're going to do sort of like a panel discussion in Q&A. And at that time, in between her talk and the discussion, you'll have about 10 to 15 minutes. If you guys have a question for Timony, go ahead and write it on that card. You could do that anytime during the talk. And then we'll ask her all those questions when we're doing the discussion. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Timony West to the stage. All right. Howdy, everybody. I am so glad to be here back in Balmuth, San Francisco, after spending the last five months in Brooklyn. Is that OK? And I'm really glad that you all can make it out this evening. I especially want to thank Julie for asking me to come and speak at GitHub. I think passion projects is a phenomenal idea. And I'm really glad she thought of me. Because when I saw the list and saw people I know and people that I really admire on the list, I was really honored to be included in that. And I want to thank GitHub too for sponsoring the event. So before I dig in, let me introduce myself. My name is Timony West. And you're probably wondering how to pronounce that before. It's Timony, like Jiminy. OK, you got it. Let's see. And also I should say, I don't often have an opportunity to use a lot of keynotes, really awesome slide animations. So bear with me for this slide. This heads up. So right now I'm a UX designer at Foursquare, which is a little location sharing app. Some of you may have heard of. And previously I was a product designer at Flickr. And before that I was, let's say, like an everything designer at Scribd. OK, so you may have noticed some similarities between the companies that I've worked at. Location sharing, photo sharing, content sharing. I spent most of my career designing interfaces that encourage people to put data online. As most of my peers, probably a lot of you in the audience. And frankly, hopefully some of the greater minds of our generation. I think a lot of you have probably seen this quote, the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. And that would suck if it were true, surprisingly handsome, Jeff Hammerbocker. But fortunately for all of us, it's not. But it is clear why he said that. We have been tricking people into doing things, particularly UX designers. Here's a great quote from Bill Gibbons. We've gotten pretty good at being able to subconsciously influence and alter behavior, which creates a vexing ethical conundrum for UX designers. The UX professional must understand that for every product created with the best intention, there will be another that deliberately nudges users to end not in users' best interests. So yes, we've been doing a lot of that stuff before. It's all over the place online. But let's focus on the good parts. What have designers and engineers also been focusing on? OK, this is a really great graph. This is what we've been actually doing, getting people to put tons of their information online. So this graph is actually not very good. It's a sucky graph that literally just shows the basic type of information each service was designed to collect. It doesn't show a lot of other activity, like Facebook likes, or Instagram shares, or more importantly, user effort. So for example, YouTube users upload something like 72 hours of video every second, which is pretty freaking phenomenal considering how much more it takes to make a video than a tweet. So keep in mind, this graph is not supposed to be comparative. It's just supposed to make it clear that when it comes to getting people to share what's in their brains and get it online, we're killing it. So good job, product makers. So when I was asked to talk about my passion at these passion products, I had a little bit of an epiphany. Because if you'd asked me a few years ago what my passion was, I would have drunkenly talked to you guys for hours about how we were collecting all this data, but we weren't saving it, or not archiving it in a useful way, or we weren't giving it back. And honestly, it stressed me out a lot. For a while, it seemed like a lot of web apps were just huge black holes for data. But it turns out, thankfully, I was not alone thinking about this. I think it's one of the next big problems, and it's a very interesting problem on the internet right now. How do we display the data back in useful ways? How do we give it back to the users in good way? And even if they don't like it, maybe we could do something cool with it on our own. So showing data back in useful ways is not a solved problem, but it's a problem that a lot of people are thinking about right now. A lot of great companies as well, like, for example, GitHub. I can't tell you how happy it made me to see GitHub releasing Pulse. I don't know if a lot of you guys have seen this before. It's a clever dashboard for repos with graphs for all sorts of activity, like pull requests, commits, and so on. And lots of other companies are making strides towards this. For example, Facebook's Timeline. Before Facebook came out with a timeline, I didn't really get the impression that they cared a lot about storing user data and displaying it back. So it could have to them for hiring a bunch of, like, kick-ass designers and really tackling the problem heads on. But of course, there's a lot more on the internet than my just sharing videos about how gay marriage is now legal in New Zealand. It's awesome as that is. For example, the Digital Public Library of America. This is a collection of items that time has made clear will be important to humanity over the centuries, right? The Internet Archive, Google's Art Project. This is an announcement from the popular blog Paleo Future saying they're joining up with the Smithsonian Blog Network back in 2011. And this isn't your typical blog turns into a book deal. But if you care a lot about information and data and education, this is actually a lot more interesting. And here's one that I recently learned about. That's totally awesome, the Endangered Languages Project. Apparently, there's about 7,000 languages in the world and about 40% of them are endangered right now. So this site is designed to collect samples from anyone that can preserve whatever language for posterity. OK, so there's a lot of great repositories of information out there right now with solid searches. And they're doing their best to make sure that the information is relevant and accessible, searchable, and archived. Perhaps they're not always succeeding, but I think everyone's generally on the same page. So that got me thinking, what am I really passionate about now now that designers are mobilizing and product makers are mobilizing and tackling this problem that I was worried about for so long? So I thought about it a lot. And here's what I come up with. And I'm really fascinated by this particular challenge, which is teaching the people of the world, not necessarily the academically inclined or the naturally curious, but all of the people of the world to use this data in access and on a regular basis. And I think this is a much harder problem than just getting the data and storing the data. But I think it's also the great hope of anyone who ever worked on the internet or who dreamed about it in centuries prior that people would actually want to use the resources that are available to them. So right now, basically we have easy ways for people to put information online, not necessarily their own even, anyone's data. And we have interesting challenge in getting that data back to them. But actually having a multitude of data available to you doesn't necessarily mean that it would even occur to you to go and look for it. So once I realized this was the problem that I've been probing towards, I realized I had a lot to learn. Because of my current job and my previous jobs, I'd never really framed the problem like this before. How do you get ordinary people to want to learn and be aware of data? And when I say ordinary people, by the way, I do mean like ordinary people like a billion people in China, ordinary. Right now we've designed interfaces for tech-savvy users, and we're starting to move out to regular consumers. But the interfaces that we design now are the genesis of all the interfaces that will follow, the ones that will come in the future. The patterns we invent, the tropes that we have now, this is all going to be affecting technologies that most people in the world will eventually have access to. And keep in mind, the more poor or backwater the country, the more likely they are to have old and outdated technologies. So 200 years from now, hopefully everyone will have something better than a cell phone. But some of them might have really, really old devices. And if we're not careful, they'll have really sucky interfaces. OK. So having framed the problem, I started researching what large data collection companies and projects are around, and how people who collect that, I think, of the problem. And this is one of my favorite snippets from Brewster Kale, who founded the Internet Archive. He gave a long now talk up at Force Mason a couple of years ago. And this is a snippet, I'll be showing a snippet from the end of the talk when, during the Q&A, and someone asked, how can we help the Internet Archive? So wrote them. I could mime it. What do you want most that you've not got yet and why? And how can we help you get it? Oh. Softball. I think the big step for us is to figure out how to be used more. How to, the real aspect that I think we need to do next is to try to figure out how to be more useful to people. Right. Exactly. I'd already started thinking about this talk before I saw this video, but I was instantly like, yes. That is it. This is what we need to do next. OK. Sorry, guys. Just have a subtle loop. Anyway, there's so much good data out there, and there's so few people out there that would even wonder if the Internet Archive even existed, much less try to go seek it out and see whether or not it really did. But you might be asking why that's such a big deal, right? Like, I mean, most of humanity wasn't even literate. For most of our history, much less into doing analytic thinking. So why do we care or not whether or not the average user is informed? People who care already care, and they're doing a pretty good job. And that's a good question. That is something that I actually had a hard time finding a concise example to give as an answer until a few weeks ago, actually, during the Boston bombings. I found an awesome post by an economics student named Jacob Geller, in which he discussed how odd it was that more people die weekly in Iraq every week from bombings in 2012 than died in the Boston bombing. And that's insane. Like, I didn't know that. Why on earth did I not know that? Like, frankly, I might have read it, and I forgot. But why would I forget that? That's kind of a big deal. So this is what he says. He says, psychologically, we, all of us, have a dramatically different response to a senseless death when it's an eight-year-old in Boston versus when it's an eight-year-old in Fallujah. This flies in the face of almost all of our ethical world views, yet it is an inescapable psychological phenomenon. And he goes on to say that we all know that this is wrong, this vacillation between caring and caring on the basis of arbitrary things like distance and nationality. And yet we all do it anyway. So there's the answer. As unsatisfying as it is, this is how our brains have evolved. It's not even really a socialization issue, at least not at first when you're young. We're designed to live in tiny tribes of 300 people or so, not carry about billions of people and millions of different groups. But these carefully-honed instincts are failing us now. They're not even what we'd consider ethical now. On some level, you could argue that our brains are not capable of supporting our own moral beliefs, which is a very odd position to be in. So here's another way of framing the problem by Robert Wright, who's a writer and scholar who does a lot of work around evolutionary psychology. He says, the world's single biggest problem is the failure of people or groups to look at things from the point of view of other people or groups, i.e. to put themselves in the shoes of the other. He goes on to say that he's not talking about empathy in the literal sense of the word. He's just talking about the ability to comprehend and appreciate the perspective of the other. So how can we become more empathetic? The same way you become more empathetic towards your family, your peers, and your friends, you learn more about them. And when it comes back to our jobs, creating things for the internet or for devices, as most of us do, I think, in our best case scenario, we would ambiently teach people, teach our users as they go about their business, that data should be displayed as naturally and seamlessly as a status bar. Because, for example, to go back to the Iraqi bombings, information is most useful in context. Knowing that there were 18 bombings a week in Iraq doesn't really help you very much now. And frankly, in the context of the bombing, it almost sounds a little insensitive to bring it up now, by comparing this number to a much larger number is taking away from the whore of the bombings. So our job, if we want to teach people who have no real motivation to learn or, in fact, might consciously or subconsciously shy away from learning, it's all about giving information at the right time. Most people aren't interested in seeking out new information or researching what they hear about on the internet. The internet's generally considered for entertainment, not all the time, but a lot of the time. And there's a few reasons for this. The first is that we don't necessarily teach them that there's any useful information at all on the internet. Lots of interfaces are effectively black holes with search boxes, like email or text message UIs. Here's an example. So this is the incredibly slick and awesome Facebook social graph search, which I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen before, right? It's not only very powerful, but it very easy to make hilarious connections between people groups, which entire tumblers have been devoted to. And you can see a lot of your own data online filter through your own's actions or your friend's actions, too. For example, this screenshot is a query of photos of my friends commented on by friends and liked by me. And this was a really easy query to set up. It's fairly complicated. But I don't use the social graph stuff routinely. And I'm guessing a lot of you don't either. And unless you're an advertiser and you're like in a really stalkery mood, why not? And I think the answer here is context, actually. There's no context here beyond your query. In other words, there just isn't that much to learn from this. This tool could be about finding interest in correlation and drawing out these correlations. But it really doesn't do that. It just shows you a big pile of results. So that's one reason people might not naturally be drawn to learning more on the internet, because it's not really clear that you can. So here's another reason. And this one in the UI is a little bit harder to solve, actually much harder. Bias assimilation. Bias assimilation is associated with cognitive bias, as you might have guessed. And here's a definition from Cass Sonstin, who's a pretty fantastic legal scholar over at Harvard. He says, a Bias assimilation is people assimilate information in a selective fashion. When people get information that supports what they initially thought, they give it considerable weight. When they get information that undermines their fundamental beliefs or their initial beliefs, they tend to dismiss it. And this is not a huge surprise, right? Looking for information at an advance before they make a decision or form an opinion, it's just not how human brains work. Brains don't like to spend a lot of time debating options. They like to take big mental shortcuts whenever possible. And this totally made sense like 10,000 years ago. You hear something that could be a wildcat, you run away from the wildcat. You see someone who looks like a stranger, you run away from the stranger. But the result now is that we have bad mental shortcuts persisting, like stereotypes. And when people learn something new, something that really should break down that stereotype, they often will just straight up ignore it. And I don't just mean that they listen and discard. Sometimes they'll shut down mentally, but often they'll also shut down physically. They'll turn off the television, they'll move away from the speaker. Like they'll actually physically move away from things they don't want to hear. So that's another big reason people don't seek out data. Who wants to deal with finding out things, and then you have to process them. And then if you disagree with them, you have to deal with that and so on. So like I said, this is a harder problem because it's very unconscious. No one wants to think of themselves as closed-minded. But there is a glimmer of hope. The human brain doesn't have a lot of practice dealing with lots of historical or written data. Until the 20th century, only a tiny negligible portion of the population was littered, and now we're at 84%. This is a huge opportunity. People's brains are definitely going to be changing. And people have already thought about this a lot, of course. In 1945, Dr. Vannabar Bush wrote a really lovely article for the Atlantic called, As We May Think, which you might have heard of. If you haven't heard of Bush before, he was an engineer who was basically the head of R&D for the US military during World War II. He worked on computers. He worked on Memex. He worked on the Manhattan Project, Super Smart Guy. So after the war, he wrote this article encouraging post-war scientists to figure out how best to use the things that they had made during the war to increase knowledge for all humanity after the war. So here's what he has to say about archived information versus the brain. OK, he says, a record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended. It must be stored. And above all, it must be consulted. The human brain does not work this way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the Association of Thoughts in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. So the first step to teaching people in such a way that they grasp information instead of shying away is to work without associative brain. And one thing we do know is that people are always really interested in themselves. And then they're interested in others once they get the connection. So we can enter through the back door, so to speak. We can teach people to parse information by telling them things about themselves. Better yet, we could flat out surround them with information in such a way that they can do comparative analysis really anytime they hear any data at all, as a little pie in the sky. But that would be cool. So if we want to start doing this, if we want to start making data available to everyone in a subtle, useful, clever way, here are a few guidelines to follow to create interactions where even the least curious could start to be well-informed. So number one, the UX should be subtle. OK, so a subtle UX does not necessarily equate to a subtle UI. And I know this sounds a little weird, so I want to show you an example of what I mean. When I was kid, my grandpa was huge into sports. And I remember him watching TV silently while having a radio in the background that was also playing another game at the same time. And I don't think he's alone because I've been to ball games before where I've seen people with headphones on. And I think they're listening to another game while they're at the other game. OK, so if you've seen this, it might not be any surprise to learn that one interface maker that's pretty much killing it when it comes to giving you comparative ambient data all the time is ESPN. OK, so I thought the user experience should be subtle, and this does not look subtle at all. Like, this is a huge thing covering up the entire screen. And that's a fair point. That's why I said the UX should be subtle, not necessarily the UI itself. This is a huge overlay, but you don't see it for very long. And this is a key point. The information on this page, and there's a freaking crazy amount of information, is displayed during a specific time in the game or in there some downtime. And ESPN knows the viewer might even be a little antsy and want to know what's going on during the rest of the playoffs. So while the data here is huge, it is not invasive, and the timing is key here. Here's another fascinating example. And I apologize for the low quality here, but I really liked it a lot. This is ESPN comparing, I think it was, yeah, the Brewer's Prince Fielder to the Astros Lance Bergman back in 2008. So there's a game going on in the background. It's the Yankees versus the Indians. But in the meantime, ESPN is comparing stats from two high-ranking players on completely different teams to give context for a game that's going on in the background. Again, this is like a lot of data, but it's shown at the right time, and it gives useful comparisons. So even if you know nothing about baseball or sports in general, it's basically impossible to walk away from a game not being somewhat well-informed. OK, so this is live television, and we can't just be popping up interstitials of people every five seconds on the website. Like, hey, did you guys know this other information? I hear you. So the next example will have things have a location where contextual information could live very happily, and incidentally, it goes along really well with the second guideline, which is that the interface should provide context. So there is a rapport, a very strong conversation that goes on between the content organizer and the viewer of that content, no matter where you are. And it's a conversation that is started and framed by the organizer, and designers and engineers on the internet, this is us. We are the content organizer context organizers. All the well-meaning library scientists in the world can't force us to display things in a useful way as much as I'm sure they would like to. So here's a great example of a site that could provide tons of contextual data with a natural user experience, and it's not sports. It's art. OK, so this is Google's art project, which is an absolutely wonderful and lovely site, and I do feel a little bad picking on them, but I am going to pick on them a little bit. So this painting is The Return of the Prodigal Sun. If you can't see that in the corner, it's a Rembrandt. It's very orange. If you click on the Details button up in the corner there, you will see this, which has things like the dates, information on Rembrandt, what the painting means, who commissioned it, and so on, like typical good museum notes. So there's a lot more functionality on this page, obviously, and I'll go through it pretty quickly. You can recommend the painting on Google+, which is a thing that I probably will not ever do. You can browse by other artists or collections. You can add the painting to your own gallery, which is, say, Organizer for Later. You can share it on a ton of social networks, which is really cool. You can view it in a slideshow, although I don't know where the rest of my slideshow is. That's a little weird. You can compare it to other paintings. I actually couldn't figure out how to do that either. And you can see the painting and context in the museum where it resides, which is sort of an interesting context. I'm not really sure what the overall use of that is, but it's really cool. You're going to see it. Here it is at the Hermitage in Russia, which is interesting, at least. OK. So there's a lot of stuff you can do with this painting on this page, but what is missing? Again, context. There's a lot of basic stuff that we know about this painting that isn't displayed or even really available from this page. Like, for example, there's no real time or real browse by date interface, like what else was being painted at this time around the world, like what was being painted at China at this moment? Take the mystery bottom navigation and add in clearly labeled pieces that are related to either Rembrandt, chronologically, thematically, by location, and so on. What else was being painted by Rembrandt's peers? And that is something that you normally do get from a museum, because museums tend to be arranged by region and chronologically. What was going on in the Netherlands when Rembrandt painted this? This was painted in the Netherlands, by the way. So that's just interesting stuff that puts the painting in context. But remember, users like to know things about themselves, and that's how we're going to get them to dig into the data. So we could show things like, have they looked at other Rembrandts before? Have they looked at this Rembrandt before? Do they have some emotional connection to this painting that they're not even really aware of? Do they like it a lot? Do they go back to it? Do they look at a lot of Dutch painters? Do they look at more Dutch painters than other people in the world? Where do people go to look at this painting? I'm guessing Russia, because it's in Russia. But interesting information. So you get the idea. Let's get people interested in the painting on a personal level, and then expand that out to the global level. OK, step back for a moment. I just said a lot of words. Yes, avoid using too many words. OK, so there's a lot of information that I just mentioned about the previous page that could be shown without using a lot of words. Like use a map to show where visitors are looking at the painting now, or where the painting lives, or actually how it ended up at the Hermitage. Use a graph or a calendar to show how many times a viewer has looked at the painting, or other people have looked at the painting, or looking at the painting now. But I want to give you a good, really tiny, succinct example of using words versus not using words. So this is Tim Ferriss' website. I think probably a lot of you guys know who Tim Ferriss is. But if you don't, he's a lifestyle modification expert. And this is his blog about four-hour work weeks, which is not a lot of time. So for most of his blog posts, he puts in this handy little snippet that tells you how long it will take to read the blog post. Like here, it's three minutes to read the bolded parts, and 15 minutes to read the whole thing. It's very handy. It's good because you only have four hours. So. And this is the New Republic, which is a very pretty new site. And they have something similar. It's up here. It's a little bit more subtle. So this doesn't tell you how long it will take to read the whole thing, I guess, because they don't really know what your reading speed is. But they do have a great subtle ambient way of telling you how much you've read of the article and how much you have left. And this is great. It's very smart. You think that the scroll bar alone could give you that information. But with headline sizes differing and with comments in the bottom, you don't actually know how long the article is. So they solved the problem here. So that's two examples of basically displaying the same information, one with words, one with out words. The more ancillary information that you want to display, the better it is to use graphics. They're less likely to be glossed over than a blob of words. And they're more likely to be picked up on a subconscious level. So use less words. And now the final guideline. Focus on the personal to get to the global. OK, so as I mentioned before, people really like learning about themselves. They really do. They just don't know how to do it very well most of the time, which is things like horoscopes and pop quizzes, like what type of color are you, or so popular. People are avidly curious. They just don't really know where to start. And we can use this basic instinct coupled with all of the data we have to inform people about things of reading and learning and seeing and context. So here's a couple examples. Not that. OK, so this is Recollect, which is a tiny product that a few of my old Flickr colleagues and I made a few years ago, Chris Martin and a Bircham fan. It stores your data from across different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, archives. It makes a searchable, backs it up. Basically, Dropbox for your online life. So this is the debut, which shows you what your day looks like based on what you put online. There's a map view. There's the weather. There's calendar somewhere. Shows you past check-ins and so on. But this is just the basics. This is what I was talking about earlier. It gives you your data back in a useful way. We could also do things to actually remind you to go to Recollect, like maybe in your calendar and it pops up a small view on the side to see all of your activity and context. In an email, you could see a sidebar when you're looking back at old emails that show you a little blurb of what your day was like at that time. Subtle UX cues that show up at the right moment, like ESPN. So this is really boring screen shots, all right, guys. This is Adium's chat transcripts. I don't know if a lot of you guys back up your chats, but I definitely do. So you could run basic analysis on this and have it displayed ambiently all the time. For example, when you talk to someone, do you have long conversations? Do you have short conversations? What's the mood of your conversations? Do you use more negative words, positive words, happy words, business words? It might be a little scary to show this information back to people who don't really get that computers don't care about your social life and don't really have an agenda. So we have to make it clear that it's either opt-in or just have a lot of good onboarding education around it. But ambiently displaying the information and giving it back to the users, making it available all the time, is what gets people thinking about it. And that's really what we want to do. Really, these are the two main goals of interaction design for large data, for a democratic data system. And again, we're trying to get everyone who uses a device here, not just intellectuals, not just the curious, to start thinking and remembering that this data is all around them and they can access at any time they're reading or viewing or thinking about anything in a larger context, in a global or historical context. So what would this look like on other websites that are around now? I didn't mock up any interfaces, because I'll be damned if I'm gonna tell people how to design their UIs with pie-in-the-sky interfaces. But I'll give you some examples of existing features and then a couple brainstorming ideas I had to get the juices flowing. So this is Flickr's Creative Commons, which I think probably a lot of you guys have heard about before. Okay. Basically, Flickr gathered a lot of open source and government images from around the globe, different NGOs, libraries and so on and offered to host them. So you've got a ton of excellent historical images, usually free to use with a lot of context, good tags, very searchable, awesome. And this is an excellent UI because it's so seamless. The data is already in the system and Creative Commons photos come up in search results right alongside everything else. If you search for a ship, you're gonna get old pictures of ships right alongside new pictures of ships. You can't help but stumble across the information. Let's see what's next. Okay, so social graph search. I actually critiqued this earlier, but I do think it's useful in that it gives, it makes it clear that the data is available to people and that they can manipulate it. So it is a good first step. I would love to see them start to populate or backfill information from previous populations. They could totally take it from there. It'd be amazing to care populations or to compare populations now to populations past. And again, they could easily make it a seamless part of the interface. So, so Twitter, Twitter's a little bit harder because they, I don't get the impression that on the product side, they care much about having the data available later on, which is why they've sort of moved it off to the Library of Congress. So, thank goodness for the Library of Congress. So Twitter stuff might largely be in the realm of the third party developer, which is a little sad because if you don't bake stuff like this into the product right away, if you make it a plug-in or you make it a one-off product, it will seem a little gimmicky and temporal and people will honestly just forget about it. I've seen a lot of cool data-vis stuff around Twitter that I just don't even remember anymore. But that being said, you could do things like analyze tweet-sized bytes of information from newspapers in the past and compare it to the headlines of today. Sentiment analysis is where Twitter really shines because people tend to not edit themselves and they use a lot of emotional words. And Wikipedia, which is my favorite because it has so much potential. It's so ripe with possibility. Thinking back to Google's art project, it would be fascinating to have some sort of personal overlay on top of Wikipedia. So anytime, anywhere you're looking, you can see yourself in context, in history. Or you can compare historical events like the War of 1812. What wars were before 1812? What wars came after? How many lives were lost in this war compared to other wars and so on? Having that data exposed or at least easily available would be amazing. So I think you guys get the idea and hopefully you guys can think of sites that could either use this or should be doing this or maybe hopefully are already doing this, which would be great. Okay, I think it's time for me to finish up and let me summarize a little bit. What do we know? We know that once people are aware of facts and absorb them that they remember them later. And we know that humans are generally good, either because of their fabulous natural personalities or because of socialization. It doesn't really matter which, we're just sort of predisposed social animals. We sometimes kill each other, we generally don't like killing each other, but we have to be taught in order to extend our basic goodness from our small social groups to the world at large. And finally, and this is kind of most important, at least in the short term, we know from experience that if we create social patterns that people repeat them. There are things that people do now that didn't make any sense at the time, but do make sense in the long term, like swaddling babies, not hitting your sister, knowing how to chew tree bark to get rid of headaches, social wisdom that isn't even necessarily conscious wisdom that gets passed down as habits over time. So internet makers, we've already created tons of habit forming products. Let's start making new habits, better habits. So we wanna do this because humans have traditionally not had access to information. And we know that when humans have better access to information and are open to that information, they make better choices, they improve their lives, and they improve the lives of others. The more we learn from history, the more we improve our circumstances, the better we are as humans. Thank you. Thank you, Timony. You're amazing. Hashtag best talk ever for Timony. So we're gonna take a quick break. If you guys have questions for Timony, go ahead and pick up your note card and your pen under your chair. If you don't have one. If you guys wanna give her a big round of applause for the amazing talk she just gave, that'd be awesome. And here we are. Now you get to sit and drink. And this is, yeah, that was the last minute I attempted to make a not a genotonic vodka and tonic. I found some vodka, thankfully we had some. So thank you for sticking around. We got a couple questions and I have a few questions of my own for Timony. But what an amazing talk. It was actually our first design talk of the series and so the last few speakers have been engineers and also sort of organizers for things like Railsbridge and other women's organizations for learning how to code. And so this was definitely a completely different talk than those and which I'm hoping that carries on throughout the talk series. So thanks for being a part of that and thank you for being a part of that. How many of you guys are designers? How many of you guys do nothing in tech? Or not in tech? Chris Wandsrath does nothing. I can vouch for that, actually. I don't even know, we just keep them around for his hair. That's pretty much it. It's pretty great hair. It's pretty great. Cool, so I think we have Timony mic'd up now. Thanks again, Timony, for being our first design speaker. It was an amazing talk. How did you get into design? How did I get into design? Like website design, website. I got into design because I designed websites. My high school boyfriend and I broke up and I made a website devoted to the breakup. When deosities went down, I saved it, I still have it. You can't see it. I don't know why I decided to do a web design. I supposed to like, I don't know, a book or something. Yeah, I was already sort of obsessed with the internet pretty early on and I think I just wanted to start going from there. Actually, I didn't make a distinction between web design and other types of design at first and I think that's actually kind of carried on through to today. Although I did work at an agency that didn't do design at all for a while. But yeah, I just started playing around computers. That's okay, probably like most of you guys did. Cool, so what was your first experience with technology? Like how did you decide that you had this passion of love for computers? Uh, well we had Apple 2E's at the school and I learned basic and played a lot of organ trail. And then, and then actually when I got older, when I first started using a Mac with a graphic user interface, I was actually really fascinated with the folders. You know how you like put folders and folders? And I thought I was being very clever by hiding all my files inside like folders, inside folders, and then having like fake folders. So it was like this little path you had to go through to get to my diary. This is before spotlight, obviously. Yeah, and then I think I started laying out some stuff, newspaper style, I guess. So yeah, I guess that wasn't really websites. I was like eighth grade or so. We had to do a project and I was like, I'm gonna lay out everything using PageMaker probably. Yeah, journalism in high school worked on that. So it was really natural. There wasn't any aha moment. I just found myself always on computers designing stuff all along. Cool, and I mean you're sort of a generalist. So you went to school and decided to study English. Yes. Which is, you know. Yeah, me and Tim and I actually discovered that we are the only two people on the planet that study in medieval literature and college. Yeah, we're gonna have some awesome late night conversations like I tell you. Yeah, and so that kind of made you, how do you think that helped or hindered your kind of design process or learning to design? I think it helped that in that I knew the tools really well because I think when you go and take a class that teaches you how to learn, or teaches, yeah, how to learn an application you probably get, you get whatever the teacher teaches you as the framework, right? Like whatever they use, that's how you learn to use the product. And if you just learn yourself then it's all sort of piecemeal. So that was definitely an advantage. And also not really thinking about UX or visual design as separate components. Certainly it's a big discussion in the design community now but I think that was an advantage for me personally. I think the disadvantage is, we talked about this yesterday, like there's some, when you teach yourself there's some basic stuff that you'll always miss and that you'll come up with some clever workaround for and then years later you're like, what? You can just do that? What? You know, so that's the disadvantage. Like you'll always be a little behind in certain areas. And I think we're all kind of behind in every, like technology moves so quickly that I mean you could learn like a language or a specific framework and within a year you are like you're no longer employable in that sense, I guess. One of my favorite tweets of all time is Chris DeFunct, who's a founder of GitHub, tweeted, learning Git recently. So fairly recently, which I think was really funny because that's absolutely how you learn every technology. You have to be constantly learning and relearning and unlearning and then learning again. In order to kind of be proficient at something. That's actually a good point. I wonder if a lot of non-coding designers would agree with that because like on the coding, I do like mark up in some JavaScript that don't hire me to do JavaScript. But I also know like the Adobe Creative Suite and I would say the Creative Suite has not changed as much as like CSS for HTML4 to HTML5, right? So yeah, I wonder if other designers would agree. Maybe like motion graphics designers, but certainly for visual designers, like they just see the same interface with sort of minimal improvements. And I've been using Photoshop since like 4.0, right? Yeah, and Photoshop wasn't like designed to build websites or to design websites. Yeah, no, it wasn't. So that's actually a hack as well. Like we were using photo software to design pictures of websites, which is like amazing and but also hilarious. Yeah, so what's your favorite thing about designing? You work at Foursquare now. You work at some of like the most amazing startups and companies that were like very much like some of the first kind of product innovations, I guess you would say? Like Flickr with photo sharing, Script with document sharing, and so many of your like personal inside projects and freelance projects are just like the first of their kind. Like what would you say is like your favorite thing to work on? That's my favorite thing to work on. It's always what I'm not working on. Like whenever I design in like if I have to do visual comps, then I suddenly really want to code. And then if I do too much coding that I just want to do wireframes. I don't know if that was exactly what you were asking. When I do side projects or I find things that are really interesting, it tends to be a very clever use of data, which kind of makes sense, right? Cause that's primarily what I work in. I know that's very broad, but yeah, that is generally what interests me. That's really awesome. So how did you decide you were gonna go work at Foursquare? Well, actually Leah, it's Leah's fault. She had gotten a bunch of beta invites to Foursquare back in the day. And so I started using it like pretty early on when the product was really young. And then Alex, the head of product at Foursquare had pinged me about a year ago, but I had just gone freelance and I didn't really want to move to New York. And then when I decided I wanted to move to New York, I got back in touch with him. And it was kind of a no-brainer. I used Foursquare every single day and a half for quite some time. So it was really exciting to go work on a product that I've known and loved for so long. And I really liked the things they were doing, pivoting into explore stuff and moving away from the game mechanics. Something that was really cool the other day, I Googled a restaurant or something on just on my phone. And a Foursquare venue page came up before a Yelp one and I was like, yes, they're winning. No offense, ex Yelpers who mostly work at GitHub. That's really awesome. So I'm going to read off a few of our cards that we got questions during the talk. This one's pretty vague, but I think it's about sort of talking about when you were using products as representations of displaying data, someone asked about what about BitTorrent? Do you have any opinions on how they use data modeling or displaying data to their users? Do you use BitTorrent? You know, I don't actually use BitTorrent. Use that. Huh, I don't know. Like, what am I missing? I don't know either. I don't do anything illegal. Is it? I do illegal stuff. I know. Does a person ask the question? Yeah. OK, what are we missing? What is it? Yeah, so I guess it's sort of an influence to how we're trying to get information available in the large number of people. Yes. OK. To make technologically with BitTorrent. Let's not that again. No. That's not it. Technologically with BitTorrent, it's easy to make all the media ever created by humans. Oh, I see. I see what you mean. OK, so the question. I'll just repeat that. I think it's more about making information available to everyone. Yes, right. My response would be that I'm guessing what you have right now is a large data dump, right? Is that do you actually have ways of visualizing the data that people can access or the search results? Apparently, it's basically just a blank search box. OK, it's a search box, and then you get results and so on. OK, so you really, yeah. Well, that's interesting. For something like that, I think the library method might be best where you start cross-indexing stuff rather than data-vis stuff. Data-vis stuff like whatever. Cool, everyone downloaded this book. That's nice to know, but that's not the most interesting thing. In your case, the files that you have, the content inside them, cross-indexing that content and making that available to users would probably be a lot more useful, I think. So something that I want to just point out is the designer just said cross-indexing, which is fucking awesome. I think that we tend to get really stuck behind these ideas of, oh, if a designer doesn't code every day, they're not technical. But one of my coworkers, and I used this in a talk recently, said that at the end of the day, we're all making software. And it really doesn't, only our tools differentiate between what part of that software we're building or contributing to. But the idea is that everyone thinks through the process as much as a developer does or a designer does. So be nice to your designers, basically, as I guess they're just as smart as you. Sorry, I have a very soft part of my heart for designers who are bad-ass. And Timony is definitely one of those people, whether or not she'd like to admit it. Hashtag Timony is the best, if you guys are on Twitter right now. So embarrassing for her, I'm sorry. So that's pretty cool. I'm going to move on to the next paper question. You could have written anything on these, and I was just going to read them verbatim. So you all missed out, by the way. So do you see new business models to support giving access to people's data to show it back to them? Yeah. Yeah, I had the manager bringing this question in advance, and I don't know if I still know the answer. Yeah, I do. I mean, I don't know if people who make decisions about who gets funded right now really would agree with that. I would have paid for Twitter years ago. Honestly, I would have paid like $10 a month or something. But paying $10 a month for Twitter and making sure I had an archive around of those conversations means that you limit your user base to the people who are willing to pay $10 a month for access to Twitter, right? So that means you can't scale globally, necessarily. So I think if you're willing to have utility that has a certain set of users, then yeah, absolutely you can. But if you want to make the next, I guess, Facebook, which is essentially an ads platform, or it's a content-serving ads platform. It's basically like TV, right? We watch TV because we like the content, but it's paid for by ads, and this is a decision that we've all made as the case. Then no, no, you can't. I don't think you could do that, monetize that correctly. Yeah, but subscription models, utility models, pay for something once and get to use it over time, yes, I think you could do that. Moving on. Still nothing embarrassing. I'm really disappointed, and yes. Wow, and this is actually just a lesson in learning how to read other people's handwriting. Do you want me to, I can try it too. Yeah, do you want to give this up? Sure. It's pretty fun. She can have my drink if she nails it. I got it. Describe how other cultures can take this information to express their culture. Examples of cultural overlays, I think it's overlays. Describe how other cultures can take this information to express their culture. So this is really interesting actually, because we talked about this yesterday when we were doing our preliminary interview of things. Sort of how exposing each other, using the internet to expose ourselves and other people to different cultures and how that will impact how we, not only how we treat other people, but how we learn and how we express ourselves and everything. Yeah, I mean, we're at a significant, the third world is at a significant disadvantage right now because we all have phones and we've been putting a lot of information online, right? Like I have been putting information online for years, you probably have been putting information online for years and there are entire parts of the world that do not do this right now. But the cool thing is once they start doing it will be more exposed to their patterns, their thought patterns, essentially. Like how do they learn things? How do they think about things? What's the narrative by which they live their lives? Do they think of time circularly? Do they think of it linearly and so on? And yeah, like that can only expand all of our minds. That's a little pie in the sky. It will be good. It will be good when we can see what they know. So that's a good segue for like, what are you excited about in the future? In technology, in your own life? What am I excited about? Yeah, this is a hard question yesterday too. I am always excited. I'm always excited. Everything's exciting. What am I excited about? You know, I always, I really want the young ladies illustrated primer. Do you guys know about this? It's like a Neil Stevenson book. Yeah, you know about it. Okay, cool, good. The interfaces that we have now, especially the touch interfaces are very low fidelity. And the notion of having, actually I had a dream about this last night. I just remembered, I was communicating with some friends in a notebook that was somehow connected to the internet, except it didn't have a good refresh mechanism. So we were all like talking to each other and then we would like write over each other accidentally. But yeah, effectively having like high fidelity ways of communicating things, but then storing them for later. And I think it's something that I really personally want. And maybe that's just because I'm a designer, but can you imagine just having a notebook that you, I mean, people keep trying to do this and they haven't done it yet, but it's so great to think you can actually write in your diary and then have that uploaded for all time. I don't know about you guys, but when I think about stuff, I have to like work really hard to get it out of my brain and onto paper fast before it goes away. And there is no device out there right now that's faster than a pen and paper. Like there is a new type on your phone, it sucks, you can like do voice dictation, I do that sometimes, that sucks. Wake up tablets are like nowhere near where they need to be in terms of fidelity. So having that, that makes me super excited. That'd be awesome, be awesome. Yeah, we'll get right on it at GitHub. Awesome, we'll just move into hardware. Yeah. Perfect. Amazing. Does anyone else have questions for Timonny? It's your last chance. She's going back to Brooklyn. Jake? So you talked a lot about the places that you're excited to hear data from, like hearing data and excited about what comes out of it. Okay. I'm curious if there's a lot of people who react to like, oh, I'm like afraid about the data that comes out of it. The data that's coming back to you? Yeah. Yeah, privacy issues, right? Right, so I'm curious if there's any, like in the corollaries to that, like are there other places where the amount of data that's being collected like increases you out of it? No, but I'm really open person. You guys repeat the question. Oh, yeah, yeah. So the question was, I don't know if it was like if Timonny specifically has concerns about that or if you see other people having concerns about how open data is, like what are the parts of it that we, I don't know, with like privacy concerns and that sort of thing? Yeah, yeah. As we're collecting data, what are the, are there any points that I'm particularly concerned about the collection of that data? Yeah, my reply was that no, I'm a very open person. I sort of, ever since that my like secret dating blog got found out by the guy I was dating in like 2004, I'm like, oh, the internet, I can't put anything on there that I wouldn't want people to know. Also, I'm very boring, which is helpful. So I guess, I guess it could be, right? Like there's a lot of data analysis that could lead to like people going on watch lists, like government watch lists. You know, people, the whole like Facebook finding or telling a guy that they know he's gay before he told his parents. That stuff seems a little creepy, but I think I have either the advantage or disadvantage of knowing again that like computers don't care, really. Advertisers care, marketers care, but they care about your money. They don't really care that you're gay. They care about marketing to you correctly, right? Your parents care whether or not you're gay, I'm sure. I wonder if there's a way that we could teach people that computers don't care. That might help. Like if you put your data back in the network, yes, someone could access it, who would care? But your computer just doesn't care, right? So I don't know, that's an interesting challenge. Trying to make sure that your computer loves you but doesn't really care what you do. It's very non-judgmental. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, like probably all of us in this room care a lot less about people seeing the data we create and the data we generate every day. I think we're definitely probably unique in that way. Well, also we know, we see the code, right? We know where it's going. We don't know that there's this little, like I get the impression, people like to anthropomorphize things, right? Am I saying that right? Anthropomorphize? Anthropomorphize. Anthropomorphize, whatever. So if they get a human reaction out of a non-human thing, they will assign a human motivation to that thing. So, in 10, right? Yeah, in 10, exactly. Computers don't have in 10. They don't know that computers don't have in 10. Maybe we can teach them that computers don't have in 10. Right, and I think it's just sort of one of those things that the more people that are using the internet, the more people who will be comfortable with it and sharing their data, and also showing them the endpoint, like, yeah, we're not going to need to take this and write a really detailed letter and send it to your priest or your mom, like we're not going to do that with your data. And I think right now we're pretty much like they, right? Where people don't understand who are building applications. They don't understand who works at these companies. They only see us as sort of like Facebook or Twitter or... Yeah, that's true. I was just going to say, like, so right now people, they're a little afraid of posting their party pics on Facebook because they're like, oh, I don't know. I don't want people to see like my last Friday night, right? Like, it's so embarrassing. I don't want my boss to see that. My guess is that as more and more peoples Friday night party pictures go on Facebook, people will care less and less. Like we already have a president who admitted to smoking pot, like, ooh, right? But like the last one was a little ambivalent about it, right, and so on. And now, whatever, it's no big deal. So if you know that everyone partied and there's like sort of anecdotal evidence that everyone partied on a Friday night. It's like a point of reference. Yeah, then like, who cares when it comes to your job interview? It doesn't matter as much as you used to. Or hopefully, shouldn't... And also you probably don't want to work for the person who cares that much about what you're pushing on. So that's also another thing. But yeah, it's the idea of recognition. So we talked a little bit yesterday about being a woman in our industry and kind of like what that means and the value in seeing another woman in our industry kicking ass and taking names and how that makes us feel more comfortable with being who we are. And I think that's, it's really similar in the way that, you know, humans process data is like, okay, like I see that someone else is doing, it's like benchmarking your life or something. It's like, oh, this person was a shit show last Friday. I guess it's probably okay that I was half a shit show last Friday. It's like, it's sort of just pushing with, for lack of a better term, like pushing the envelope or being more comfortable. Like what's acceptable behavior? What you do, depending on how I think of you, is acceptable behavior. Exactly. Yeah, so it should be like really interesting. There are all these amazing companies like Foursquare and GitHub who are really about, you know, sharing data with our users, but also making it accessible to other people so they can do really cool shit with it. I think there's like, you know, actually Obama I think tried to give a talk about data today online. Yeah, he did about sort of like the open data initiative and everything. So we didn't get a shout out, unfortunately. We were all kind of waiting like on our toes, but yeah, but it's just interesting in that like it's becoming more discussed. Like the president talked about data today. Yeah. Like would that have ever happened in any other circumstance other than everyone is using it more and everyone sees how much, how powerful it is. And I'm really happy to say that we have a big group of people from Code for America here today at Passion Projects. I don't know how many people stuck around. Anyone still here from Code for America? Yeah, cool. Anyways, and Code for America also does a lot of work in using data to make people's lives easier. In all kinds of projects, like things like just making weather alerts better for like tsunami warnings in places and using data to make everyone's lives better, not just people who spend a lot of time on the internet, like all of us. So I think the more we can kind of do to help everyone understand how data can help them, the easier it's gonna be for everyone to contribute. Cool. Yeah, anyone question? At the same time, we're just kidding. So there's a lot of data being generated right now and there's like a lot of noise but there's also a lot of stuff there like it was over the past five years or so on the internet we've kind of like noticed the emergence of this like curator. Yes. And so there's a lot of people that, you know, they kind of express themselves through like this cool thing, like this community side. I'm kind of curious how you feel about that, like should we embrace this curator culture or like fight it and empower people to find more things themselves? The question was, do we sort of embrace the idea of people curating content or data online? I think the example he gave was people like finding something they think is interesting and retreating it, for example. Like that's one way to look at it. I'm sure there's many more but what do you think, Tony? Yeah, that's interesting. It's so funny, I was literally just thinking about that earlier today. One of my friends started a company called Circa that does curated news and I was trying to think about whether I liked that notion of having a curated news source but then having sort of a summary of all the news. So this is also interesting when we talk about computers not caring because if you think about the idea of a computer creating an algorithm that you are feeding data into and that is then spinning back up content to you that it thinks is relevant because it doesn't have a motive, right? Whereas if advertisers are like generating content for you, well then you're like, well I'm only seeing what they want me to see so that I do X, Y and Z. Yeah, or in this case, like a set of like very intelligent editors. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I guess Medium actually uses a user-based algorithm to show their top posts. But Circa is curated by people. Just saying. And Tumblr, right, obviously is curated by people. Tumblr's a little weird because they have like, I think, radar off to the side but you can't see all top posts on Tumblr if I am correct unless it's in some secret corner of the Tumblr net that I haven't seen before. Man, it's tough because I've found so much good stuff from like Kaki and that is like one of the original curated blogs, right? And then I still get stuff from Kaki. It is very, I think as long as you're aware that what you're seeing isn't the whole view, that's okay. I would say long-term or at least what I was talking about in my talk, that is not a good way to get a lot of information, honestly. Especially if you wanna see different things. Yeah, if you wanna learn. You really get to see cool laser cut globes or something. But it's not a really good way to find information about what's happening in the rest of the world. Network effects, right? Like you're only going to see sort of, if you only follow people who are like you, those users are only going to retweet things that you are most likely to either already know or. So what if you could find people who aren't like you? Right. And actually something I thought about for a while I'm fairly liberal and trying to find a new source that I would trust that was very conservative. And I started listening to Al Jazeera's listening post podcast, but it gets like the BBC podcast talks about it. It's like still very Western focused, right? Like so where can I find information that's like East Asia talking about East Asia and they don't really care about America? Like that's actually kind of hard to find, honestly. But if I could and it was a curated source I would still be willing to look at that. So I wonder if there's some way to combine the two where you have sort of at least like an agnostic location or information repository and within that you find curators that are biased? I don't know. Did I answer your question? Oh, is it from a self-expression? Yeah. Okay. In terms of like finding out more about other people because they're expressing themselves through the curation. Kind of like it. So I mean I think how else do you find your people? So recently a conference was put on called Exo Exo Festival, Andy Beyo and one other human I think, human. Andy McMillan. Andy McMillan. And then so I saw Andy Beyo gave, Black Pancake gave a talk at a conference called Brio and I thought it was really interesting because he had the, that conference was all about makers and it wasn't necessarily designers or developers or it was just people, creative people who had made things. And he brought on the writer of community who's so loved by the internet. Dan Harmon is so loved by the internet and he, during the talk he played a video of something that Dan Harmon said that really was awesome and he said, you know, stand on the top of buildings and shout until you find your people and that's sort of the power of the internet is you will find them. It's just a matter of you need to, you need to kind of flag it. You need to kind of express who you are in order to find those people. Like you're never going to like do that without curating, curating the things you like. And I mean, I could lead you of course to that thing that we were talking before where it kind of becomes ubiquitous or homogenous and you end up just kind of like in the same cycle but then it's up to you to go out and find new things, right? I mean, I think it should be a mix of like curating and discovering. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Hmm, people like what they like. Yeah. And they like other people who like the same thing. I, that's okay. Yeah, that's good even. But I think it is important to be aware of other. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know, I don't know if I have a good answer for you but it is an interesting dichotomy between two things. You want to feel safe and comfortable but you also don't want to go tribal again, right? Yeah. You're also going to have to create some. You're creating more noise by curating your own thing. Yeah, absolutely. Like reblogging, reblogging, reblogging, reblogging. How many times does Amazon going to store the same image, right? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, there's no definitive answer. Maybe we'll leave it at that. Let's think about it. Let's think about it. Or better yet, shameless plug. Let's talk about it at we're having a drink up down the street at Mars Bar. I encourage you all of you to come here or to come here to come to the drink up. And I mean, I hope that these discussions continue not only like here, the reason, one of the reasons we started passion projects was to start discussions like this with awesome women. And I think we're doing a pretty decent job. So, well, I think we're maybe running out of time. So, thank you. Like so much for being a part of this. Do you have anything to end on? Yeah, thanks for coming in. I think we should probably cheers at least once, sir. Cool. Thank you guys for being a part of it. I really appreciate it. And GitHub does. So on behalf of all of us, thanks for coming in. Come have a beer on GitHub. It's free. Come drink our free alcohol. Come on. Thank you.