Marks and Symbols Updated

The marks and symbols section has been updated with more work and a wider range of elements.

Ever since Facebook announced their Open Graph initiative, the idea of "frictionless" sharing has gotten a lot of buzz. Articles are being written about how this could change social networking and society. On paper, it sounds like a great idea. Take down the barriers to social sharing. Automatically share everything you read in the Washington Post app or everything you listened to in the Spotify app. Your friends see the great article you read and the cool music you listened to. Sharing is great, so more sharing is better. Awesome right? Nope. I think that more sharing will actually hurt Facebook in the long run, and that frictionless is almost never good.

Here's where I get unintuitive. I think friction is good. It slows us down. The pace of design and business and technology forces us to move faster, to be more efficient to get more done. So when we get friction we think it's an obstacle to our goal. But I've learned that if we embraced the friction then what we get is traction. Traction helps us move forward in a meaningful way; it helps us steer versus just speeding madly forward. 

This is what traction looks like for Facebook. They should work on ways for their users to share less, but also making what they share worth more. By allowing users to edit and curate what they share, it is more relevant. The song I shared is great because it's an 80's hit that my high school friends would love. That article I shared is great because it is about design and meaningful to my design friends. And my other friends don't see either one. 

Embracing friction is hard work, it takes time, it's complicated. But I think it makes us better designers, and clients. And yes it makes us better Facebook users.

What do you think? Do you see the value in sharing everything or are you introducing friction into your social interactions like I am? I have been investing more of my time in Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn because it feels more useful and rewarding to post and read there. Please share your comments below.

Outside the Box: Interfaces Getting Real

When I saw the newly announced Wacom Inkling I was intrigued at the idea of combining a Wacom tablet and a sketchbook together. On the surface the Wacom Inkling technology is just a new and fancy way for the creative types to draw pretty pictures. But it also marks another milestone in the trend of interfaces and interactions moving beyond our devices and into the world around us. Just wait until the hackers and programmers start being inspired by it (like they are doing with Microsoft's Kinect), completely new tools that we never thought about could come into play. 

HERE ARE SOME IDEAS

Catalogs: Those paper catalogs can become a whole lot smarter with the pen allowing you to circle a product that you want to add to your cart, a square could grab the picture of the product for your Pinterest. Draw an "x" on a product and the company knows that kind of product shouldn't be in your future catalogs.

Ads: Imagine an ad for a shampoo company which invited you to draw new hairstyles on their model, and billboards which displayed all the different drawings from around the world

Education: How would schools be different with homework that is transmitted to the teachers computer when your child finished doing it, or the cute picture that they drew is on the fridges of grandparents on both coasts as soon as the last line is drawn.

So why should creative people care? The brochures, catalogs and websites that we create are living in this quickly changing world and I think it's good for us to prepare our pages not to just be clicked, but also swiped and possibly drawn on and marked up.