For thou didst form my inward parts,
thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
my frame was not hidden from thee,
when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought…
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;
in thy book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

With thanks to Sarah Tipson.

Inside the package was a jewel case and a note that began:

Hi Chris!

Since your reminiscence was in Brian’s memorial, representing the younger generation, I thought I’d send you a copy of the service. You probably will recognize most of the musicians, since your dad performed with them.

The “Brian” is Brian Howard, who died one year ago on Tuesday. The reminiscence is something I wrote here the day after, which Brian’s wife Lynne asked if they could read at his memorial service.

In the jewel case are two DVDs which hold a recording of Brian’s service. I’ll be honest: I haven’t watched them. (Or listened? I’m not even sure if it’s an audio or video recording.) I just don’t think I’m quite ready to do it yet. Somehow, at 31 years old, I’ve never been to a funeral. Not once, not yet. Not because I’ve avoided them, but because I’ve somehow known only a very few people who have died, and those few have had funerals far away at times when I was unable to travel.

And so, as special as it is to have been part of Brian’s service, I can’t yet bring myself to see it. Instead, I’m going to leave it on my desk. One of these days I’ll pop it in and listen to the music they played to honor him. Just not yet.

But Brian is on my mind today, and ever since the day this package arrived in the mail. Ever since NPR included him in a list of remarkable lives lost in 2010. Right now, I’m finding the memory of Brian’s calm, warm spirit extremely…timely. I mean, I’m a firmly non-superstitious person, but that doesn’t mean I can’t reflect on synchronicity.

For me, the synchronicity of this moment is in the bubbling excitement I feel as the little company I founded begins to find its legs. Sometimes I get so excited I have trouble sleeping. I wake up euphoric at the friends I get to work with and the stuff we get to make. And then, behind the euphoria, a little kernel of fear, telling me that these things go in cycles, that there will be a slog, that something hard is coming, that there will be endless surprises, and not all of them will be good.

And then, behind that, there’s Brian.

Calm, self-deprecating Brian. Goofy Brian. Brian, who was one of the original four people who who made a computer that changed the world, and you’d never, ever know it until someone else told you.

Brian, who did not seem to consider his work at Apple anything more (or less) special than…. well, than any other honest, hard-working job.

For the last couple of months, a quiet, kind Brian has been hovering in the back of my consciousness. He quietly listens, as he did in real life when I was a kid, to my slightly manic scheming and my eager, excited ideas. He doesn’t say much back. He’s just calm, and he listens, and maybe he even smiles a bit at the corners of his eyes.

A year before he died, Brian wrote:

Personally, I am not worried about my life ending. Really, it will be the people around me that have to deal with it, going on living with a me-shaped hole in their lives. For me it will just be over, so no concern of mine. …But I’ve had a good life, long enough, in a beautiful place, doing interesting things, surrounded by great friends and family. For me, that’s enough. And it’s a lot.”

— Ruminations on chemo, etc., February 9, 2009

After the last time we saw Brian and his wife Lynne, on a visit to Tennessee, Lynne sent me a picture she had snapped on the trail where we hiked.

I remember this moment very clearly. I was sitting on the trail alone, watching the waterfall. Brian came over and sat next to me. We sat there in complete silence, and stared at the water. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him over my shoulder. I wanted to say something, but there really wasn’t anything to say. So we just sat. I am grateful to have this picture, but I don’t need it. I was paying attention very very hard during those few minutes, so I remember them pretty well.

I’m excited about this year. I’m hopeful, and I’m stoked. But if ever I get a little too excited, too far down that road of what might happen, what could happen, what I hope will happen, what I fear will happen… there are waterfalls all around me, and it’s awfully good to just sit and hear the water for a while.

I ventured into the drizzle this morning to buy myself a Baltimore Sun.

I wanted to see the new Sun Magazine. It was restored to life today after a fourteen year hibernation.

I will admit to you some measure of excitement as I strode through an unexpectedly chilly rain.

Is that nerdy? Perhaps that’s nerdy.

But my paper and my breakfast were waiting for me at the store, my coffee and my couch were waiting for me at home, and nothing else worth noting pressed for my attention.

I was, therefore, excited (nerdy or no), and you might even say I was in the perfect mental state for consumption: Eager and ready to fall in love with my purchase.

“User Experience” is just a hip phrase for “how’d it go?”

Well, it went okay.

Yeah?

Yeah.

Just “okay”?

Yeah. Just okay.

Why?

I was afraid you’d ask that.

The problem with trying to explain “why” is that the answer is strung up on so many thorny bits of the modern news-reporting apparatus that to do the answer justice would:

1. Take weeks.
2. Send me quickly onto ground where I can only speculate.
3. Make this post unreadably long.

Therefore, in lieu of trying to be complete, I will try to simply follow

The First Thread of my Experience

The first thing that happened, after I picked the paper out of Eddie’s wireframe newstand, was that the slippery advertising section fell out of the middle of the paper and plopped into a heap upon the floor.

Lying there on the floor, it provides us a convenient place to start.

Advertising

First things first: I am not, at the present time, judging advertising. I am not making conclusions about advertising. I am not arguing for or against the necessity of advertising.

What I am doing, at the present time, is cataloguing the size, shape, and general outward appearance of advertising as it is presented in the Baltimore Sun.

Bring Forth the Scale

By weight, the advertising inserts of the Baltimore sun consume 44% of the thing I bought.

Without the inserts, the paper weighs 14 ounces:

The inserts themselves weigh 11:

Of course, the actual percentage-by-weight of all advertising in the Sun is much, much greater than 44%. If I cut every ad out of every page of the “normal” part of the paper, and add that to the inserts, we’d get something a great deal higher.

But I won’t do that, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

The Main Attraction

Let’s move on to my original enticement, the new Sun Magazine.

Below you’ll find a visual representation of the advertising in the magazine. A red block covers each ad, and the pages are arranged in a rough order of “less ads to more ads”.

Out of 44 surfaces available in the magazine, roughly 53% of them are employed to sell products and services.

Naturally, in the real layout, these ads are not sequestered to the end, but are instead mixed about equally throughout.

Moreover, it is important to note that the ads are not marked clearly in red. Many times they are dressed to look like stories.

So What?

Well, this ever-so-cursory analysis tells us a few things. The design of the advertising, as it currently exists in the Baltimore Sun Magazine, leads to the following facts about the reader’s experience:

1. When I open the magazine, it is better than even odds that my eyes are looking at an ad.
2. If my eyes do land on an ad, there is no quick, guaranteed way to know this has happened.

These facts are a very simple, very incomplete, but very incontrovertible part of the user experience of the Baltimore Sun Magazine, as it exists in paper form.

Back to this Morning

I got home, I filled my coffee cup, I pulled out my sausage-egg-and-cheese-on-a-croissant, and I happily sat down to browse the news.

And the first thing that happened? Someone is making a pitch to me. And then I get pitched again. And again. Ah, is this finally a story? Oh, nope, that’s a pitch that looks like a story.

I am, in short, engaged in a gentle yet very real struggle with the product I have purchased, to make it do the damn thing it’s supposed to do: deliver me the news.

This process leaves me ever-so-slightly frustrated, and my very first impression of this new magazine is flavored by the sense that the Baltimore Sun doesn’t much care whether I read their stories or not, as long as I read their ads.

Which, I am saddened to realize, is probably actually true, for someone over there.

The Hard Thing about Details is that There are So Many of Them, and So Many of Them Matter

There’s a saying in software: “Software is nothing but a collection of details.”

It’s hard to talk about the design of a user experience, because, like software, it is nothing but a collection of details. Some of them may even be quite poor without sacrificing the overall experience of the product — and no one gets them all right.

But similarly, some of the details may be done very, very well, and yet a collection of less important details done poorly conspire to render the whole effort moot.

For example, you may write an absolutely superb article about Baltimore, but if you deliver it in a package with just enough little frictions in just enough places, you push the probability further and further toward the chance that a given person will never read your article at all.

The challenge of designing a successful, sustainable product is finding how to lower that friction without destroying the way you eat.

This is not easy. Of course it’s not easy. Generating income is always a force in opposition to the perfectly smooth user experience. This is the trick of it.

The slippery sloshy slurry of product design is a big ol’ mess, and you won’t get it perfect, and it’s hard.

But Principles Can Help

Somewhere in your gut is a guiding principle. The reason you’re making what you’re making. The change you want to see in the world. All of the power and all of the force of your creativity is tied to this principle. This principle is the fountainhead of your energy and the anchor of your resolution.

The burning clarity of a principle can melt away the slurry. Some of it, at least.

Take reporting. I won’t presume to offer a defining principle for a reporter, but I’d be very comfortable in assuming it generally involves a relationship of trust between the reporter and the reader. When the fortunes of the newspapers began to wane, and the managers began to turn the knobs on the dying business model this way and that, searching for the magical combination that would unlock the new prosperity, it should have been clear that trickery was fundamentally incompatible with the presentation of the news. And yet advertisers are given more and more leeway to trample onto the turf of the reporter — in the case of online news, literally trampling, obscuring, or shoving aside the story. And they are permitted the grossest kind of trickery — creating ads that look like reporting — with only the meekest protestation of a tiny “ADVERTISEMENT” printed in the header to show that the original principle is, by someone’s estimation, still followed.

These kind of choices represent a shift in principle, and it’s poisonous. It doesn’t mean that advertising can’t be part of the solution^[1], but it does represent a sign that the redesign of the news is not in touch with the core principles of the news, and that’s both frustrating and scary.

Principles, and Friends

It’s easy enough to talk about these things from the outside, but it can be terribly hard to see them from the inside. I was humbled to be reminded of this only a few days ago, when my entrepreneurial energies sent me speculating down a perfectly reasonable business path. Reasonable, that is, until my teammates pointed out that, for all its merits, it would necessarily become a huge distraction, and thus poison our existing efforts. It was hard to hear, at first, as critical messages often are.

So clarify your principles, but don’t assume you can follow them alone, either.

In the Meantime

I continue my search for a pleasant way to read the stories of my city. The new Sun Magazine, as a rather watered-down style mag with enough advertising incorporated carelessly enough to make it hard to find the stories, is not a draw, and I don’t expect to walk down to Eddie’s for a paper again soon.

I want to read the news. I care about my city. I feel connected to individual reporters at the Sun, hard-working folks like Julie Scharper, Gus Sentementes, and Justin Fenton. I want to read their stories. I just haven’t found a good way to do it yet. There are enough frictions, in enough places, to push me away from the paper and, heaven forfend, the the website. These products fight me when I try to use them. They get in the way of their own mission: for me to read their stories. Not just because of how they integrate advertising, but with their overall design, format, and delivery mechanism.

Of course, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m extraordinarily picky. On the other hand, it’s the role of a product designer to develop an extraordinary pickiness. Your raw sensitivity to the tiny pin-pricks of the experience is what guides you to file away the splinters. And the splinters, in aggregate, are the thing that bleed your product of greatness.

[1] I used to think advertising was necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe that anymore, in part because of some great counterexamples.

I dig that.

Anyway, here’s the page for our conversation:

The competitive advantage of hiring artists, A conversation with Chris Ashworth

Despite the specificity of the title, we hit a bunch of topics in that hour of chatting. Listen in and hear me:

• railing against sick days
• pleading with businesses to question the rules of their workplace
• ranting about pricing your work
• wondering whether your art can be better instead of cheaper
• hollering “F permission”

and

• making my case for how Star Trek, positronic brains, human evolution and racism all relate to hiring.

It is therefore with mild horror that I now realize at least a handful of people are actually, um, reading this blog. I remain (intentionally) ignorant as to exactly how many times the server is spitting this text across the Internet, but blogs I respect and admire have done me the kindness of putting in a good word with their readership, so I must assume a few people are at least giving it a shot.

To you adventurous new readers I say hello, welcome, lovely to have you here, and if I may I’d like to introduce you to the rules and principles by which I sculpt this blog.

Rule 1: HOLY CRAP I HAVE NO RULE NUMBER ONE I DON’T EVEN KNOW IF I HAVE A CONSISTENT TOPIC

Not even a consistent topic? Not even. Or to put it another way:

This blog has a location, not a name.

Somewhat unfortunately, since it doesn’t have a name, the location becomes the name. (Location: ChrisAshworth.org Name: Uhhhhhhh…that blog on ChrisAshworth.org, aka “Chris Ashworth’s blog”).

Nice work, douche. Can’t you name it and put the focus on your topic instead?

Um, well, you have a great point, but again: I wasn’t expecting you to actually be here reading this. I didn’t install WordPress because I had a topic, I installed it because I needed somewhere to respond.

I do stuff on the Internet. Sometimes I need a place to do it. Result: website. I used to have photos hosted here. Used to have a resume here. Used to put grad school homework assignments up here. They got stale. They’re gone now. (With one exception.)

This blog has no name because it has no theme. No theme except: junk I’ve been a-thinkin’ about.

Will I be writing about theater, small business, marketing and those other things that might have brought you here? Yes. I’m face-deep in all those things right now, and will undoubtedly need a place to explore more ideas on those topics.

But just so’s ya know, you’re liable to run into other stuff around here too. Software design, or politics, or personal grooming, or, hell, the intersection of politics and personal grooming.

I’m not trying to scare you off. God forbid. I’m totally stoked you’re here. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. The greatest part of blogging is that I already disagree with half the stuff I’ve written before. Smart people called me out on things I got wrong.

All I wanna do is let you know: I’m not locking this thing down to one theme. I can’t do that. I can’t make stuff like that. Sorting my energy into themes just kills me. It kills me that when I went off to grad school for computers, everyone thought I’d given up theater. I wasn’t giving them the category they understood, so my life in theater, as they understood it, was dead. I hated that. That urge to force people and topics into a category. Their eyes would glaze over, and their categories would slice right through my life, and leave me in two pieces. I think that’s why this blog has no name. Names are powerful, and important, and manifestly necessary. But what makes them powerful and important and necessary is how they change and capture and fence in an idea. It’s very useful to fence something in, except when it isn’t. Sometimes the cage kills the thing you’re caging.

So welcome to this blog, a place where this guy named Chris does some writing. I’m completely thrilled you’re here. I can’t wait to talk to you. I just can’t tell you what we’ll talk about, because I honestly don’t know.

Robi is a unique human being. It’s really hard to describe the guy. When Robi looks at the world, he sees things you and I don’t see. I’ll give you an example in the form of a single web page:

http://www.robimookerjee.com/arsgratia/mustard.htm

Yeah, right? Crazy as hell. But also strangely revelatory.

He also once spent an idle moment sketching me a coat of arms. It’s not that I’d asked for a coat of arms, it’s just that this is the sort of thing Robi does in his spare time:

[Initial sketch for the arms of Duke Smashworth the Cammervoltaic, of the Space Duchy of Sass.]

As he described it:

Cito maturum, cito putridum: Quickly ripe, quickly rotten. A caution against wasteful and undue haste, a wise maxim for a Duchy so intimately involved with the politics of empire. Originated in reference to the Duchy’s renowned software-development caste, whose diligent and rigorous testing protocols are the stuff of legend. Not that they are slow, by any means. Rumour has it they once made the kessel subroutine run in less than twelve parsecs.

Anyway, Robi does a lot of stuff, and he does a lot of it very well. But the one thing he does better than anything is write. I mean, I know a lot of good writers, but Robi is the kind of luminous talent who proves to the world that there is such a thing as “talent”, and that you don’t have it.

The trouble with telling you this is that I can’t really support it with evidence; casual descriptions of Space Duchy’s aside, I don’t know of any public Robi writing I can show you.

I know it because I went to the same college, and that college has a private forum for students and alumni. On this forum Robi has quietly published dozens and dozens of stunning stories, essays, and unclassifiable compositions.

But the treasures are all locked behind a private wall, and Robi, despite the incessant pesterings of his college tribe, is not yet publicly published.

Well, Mr. Mookerjee, I’m calling you out: it’s time to get real. It’s time to get published. And no, I don’t care if you’ve already “tried” to get published. Whatever that idea means to you is wrong. I know this because you are not published.

Somewhere in this world is a company that will create high quality paper books fit for a man of discerning taste. That company probably has a web page. And if that company does not print-on-demand, but instead requires a traditional up-front payment for the run, then I direct your attention to several dozen rabid fans who would very likely contribute to the up-front costs. At least in the form of a pre-order. (And by the way, how did you get the power of leveraging several dozen rabid fans? By publishing your stuff free on a protected piece of the Internet. So: reconsider that no-blogging rule you’ve set for yourself.)

The age of needing a company to publish music, text, software, or other artwork is over, man. The barrier to “making” is now lower than at any other time in history. If you want your thing made, it’s your fault if it’s not.

You know, in terms of business models, just about anything beats theater:

The product can not be mass-produced.

At best, you can replicate it a few hundred seats at a time. Maaaybe a few thousand. But as soon as you digitize it, transmit it, or otherwise pull the audience away from the performer, it’s not theater anymore.

The product must be made fresh for each purchase.

Sure, you’re not making it from scratch unless you’re doing improv. But the product is a live event, and live events don’t fit in bottles, stay fresh under heat lamps, or last beyond the first serving. And making the product fresh each time isn’t even close to a mindless task, so each time you make it you need lots of highly trained people on hand.

The cost of making the product is extremely high.

Typical production costs cover a large, purpose-built room, lots of expensive equipment, scores of educated staff (half of whom are typically shipped in from out of state, because apparently New York is the only state that has staff qualified to create this product), and truly atrocious waste (how much raw material goes into a landfill after every regional theater production?).

The company can not sell the product at a high price…

The customer gets nothing tangible for their money¹. All they get is an experience. Can an experience command a high price? Sure, if it’s extreme.

• YES: space tourism, rock star concerts, high profile sporting events, elite prostitution.
• NO: movies, local cover bands, museum visits, theater performances.

…and yet the customer can not purchase the product for a low price.

Even if tickets are 2 bucks a pop, the show is not cheap. I’ll pay 2 bucks for a piece of candy and it doesn’t matter if it sucks ’cause I’m done with it in 2 minutes and I move on with my life. If the new “Post-Post-Modern Deconstructionist Christmas Carol…on Ice” sucks, that’s 2 hours of my life I can’t get back.

The quality of the product is highly unpredictable.

Perhaps no other product has a wider range of quality, from “sublime” to “unbelievable waste of time”. Moreover, there’s almost no way to know what you’re going to get—the brand of the venue is no guarantee, nor are practically any other traditional consumer signals except word of mouth. As McDonald’s will tell you, that’s no way to get lots of people in the door. Hell, even two different nights of the same show often produce wildly different experiences, depending on who shows up to watch and what mood they’re in.

The product has low demand—and probably always will.

Theater does not command much of the cultural mindscape. That’s fair; nothing gets to claim a cultural stake without earning it. Of course, America has proven that the cultural battlefield is basically the same as the economic battlefield, so waning economic leverage leads to waning cultural leverage and vice versa. It’s a nice little feedback loop that means, barring changes in human nature or laws banning the more economically viable art forms, theater will forever be a niche.

 
In light of all this it’s pretty obvious why theater is a non-profit endeavor, and why the Angry White Guy often argues that Theater is Not a Widget.

I’m not saying theater should be a widget, but man, this is a seriously challenging monetary model. With a model like this its almost a miracle we have any theaters left in a recession.

What should be our relationship to money in the theater? I think most of us would like to make a modest living and have health insurance. We certainly don’t get in to theater because we care about making a lot of money. But can we reasonably expect to meet even those modest goals under a business model like this? I mean, if I asked you to come up with a worse business model than that, it’d be pretty hard: high monetary costs, high temporal costs, high waste, low income, few efficiencies, an inability to scale, little consistency, little demand.

Some of what makes theater a bad business is, alas, also fundamental to what makes it theater. But surely it’s not a completely lost cause. Can we imagine a theater run in any other way? What if we start off with the assumption that a theater can’t make money from its art? ² How would we create a theater that runs under this assumption? Could such a theater exist? Can it be made economically robust and artistically excellent?

If I may borrow Nick Keenan’s rallying call (and his GIF):

1 Exception: dinner theater. But that chimera has historically been a dead end for both the art and the food.

2 I’m not saying I think theaters should stop selling tickets. I’m advocating for a thought experiment.

But how? The answer is probably: words. The marketplace of ideas has shown strong year-over-year growth in the “musical” and “visual arts” mediums, but let’s face it, friend: Written and spoken language remains the number 1 preferred method to transfer a thought pattern from your head into my head.

It’s a great time for idea-sharers. “Blogs”, “tweets”, “eye-ems”, “face book messages”, the “online forum”, “electronic mail”, “web pages”, and more! And if you’re old, you might remember such classic technologies as “typewriters”, or “pencils”.

Lots of ideas, and lots of ways to share them. Great! But also: crushingly oversaturated.

So make your words count! Learn the fine art of editing! Don’t know how? It’s easy! Our FREE modern guidelines show you how:

Step 1: Don’t say anything. If you have nothing to say, don’t say it! You’re already half way to whatever award it is they give to great editors.

Step 2: Wait and see if someone else will say it. They probably will, leaving you—who cleverly said nothing—with more time for the good life.

Step 3: Say it on Twitter. Okay. You’ve got a really great idea and you think the world should know. I guarantee you it will fit in 140 characters. Force yourself to find a way. The world will wait.

Step 4: Fine, use 2 Tweets if you really need to.

Step 5: Still here? Right! Then you have an idea that’s both interesting and has depth. I like your style! Now you can move on to a blog post or some other, more verbose instrument.

Step 6: Delete, delete, delete. Also: delete. Just because you need more than 140 characters to say it doesn’t mean you get free rein. Please remember the old quote: “I wrote a long paper because I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

Step 7: Climb the bandwidth ladder only as necessary. Blog post too confining? Then maybe you need a whole website to communicate your idea. Still not enough to contain your boundless creativity? It might be time to start your own The Show.

The point is this: make every word fight for its life. If you can say it in less, don’t say it in more.

I’ll probably read this tomorrow and wish it wasn’t so long.