There are a few takeaways from the passage, I’ve framed them in terms a designer might appreciate:

It is important to be a part of and contribute to the design community.

Paraphrased from the passage: a design community offers encouragement, suggestions, criticisms, and opportunities to further one’s knowledge and skill. When presenting your work to other designers, they will appreciate the subtle and deliberate details of your execution. Be certain that they will also be critical of your work, only insofar as they are interested in the discussion. Some designers may show little to no interest unless they see something in your work that they can use in their own.

Regardless, I believe we should encourage our fellow designers to contribute to these conversations, either in presenting work or critiquing the work of others, to ensure that this valuable activity does not get lost, or worse, become unproductive.

The only way to gauge user reactions in advance is to find out how they actually react, by user testing.

“If you are concocting a new dog food, the opinion of a battery of French chefs is worthless—you must try it on a jury of dogs.”

I tend to agree with Nelms here. Testing your designs on fellow designers is not very reliable, for the same exact reasons mentioned above. Instead, we need to test our designs with people who know nothing of design. This passage should resonate with those of you versed in user testing.

Don’t take criticism personally.

“Your friends’ criticisms may hurt your feelings, but never let them suspect it. If they do, they will stop telling you the truth.”

Designers know this all too well. Sure, we all try to transcend the emotional reaction to criticism. We know that it’s a critical skill of a designer to empathize and do what’s best for the user despite our emotional connection to our creation. But many of us still take criticism personally.

To account for this, Nelms suggests we not put much weight on one person’s opinion and get several people to critique our work. He closes with a statement that needs no paraphrasing:

“Individuals may have freak prejudices. You cannot hope to please everyone.”

…

Membership in a conjuring society offers many advantages: encouragement, suggestions, criticisms, and unparalleled opportunities for studying the art of deception. Nevertheless, performing for conjurers is the worst possible way to test the value of your presentations. Everything you do, literally everything, has a different value for conjurers than is has for laymen. Conjurers are fascinated by subtle devices and difficult sleight of hand. Laymen are incapable of appreciating either the subtlety or the difficulty. In fact, if the performance succeeds, the layman cannot even guess what methods have been used. On the other hand, laymen are easily impressed by illusions, whereas conjurers are immune except in rare cases like The Charlatan. If you try to dramatize a routine for a brother conjurer, you will merely bore him—unless he sees something in your routine that he can use in his own act.

When you work out a routine for laymen, test it on a friend who knows nothing about conjuring. Ask for his detailed criticism. Then try your routine on another friend and get his opinion. If several laymen find fault with the same spot in your routine, it is bad.

A layman’s diagnosis of what is wrong will usually be false and will often be absurd, but he almost always puts his finger on the point where the trouble lies. When lay friends criticize your presentation of The Strong Man’s Secret “because you held your hand in a funny way while the string was being pulled,” you need not pay much attention to their reasons. Perhaps your face provided a clue, or it may have been something you said. On the other hand, you can be fairly sure that something went wrong at the point they criticize.

This is true no matter what you think and no matter what your conjurer friends think. It is true whether your lay critics are intelligent or stupid. You are preparing a routine for the public, and the public contains a large percentage of fools. The only way to gauge audience reactions in advance is to find out how laymen actually react. If you are concocting a new dog food, the opinion of a battery of French chefs is worthless—you must try it on a jury of dogs.

Your friends’ criticisms may hurt your feelings, but never let them suspect it. If they do, they will stop telling you the truth. On the other hand, do not put much weight on one layman’s opinion. Get several to criticize your routine. Individuals may have freak prejudices. You cannot hope to please everyone.

Part I ends on a note about empathy as a critical skill for magicians, con artists, filmmakers, designers; essentially, anyone who creates anything with an end user in mind.

Jamy expresses concern for his fellow magicians who get so caught up in the methodology and technology that they forget why they’re doing it all in the first place: to engage the mind of the viewer. The same is true for designers, technologists, and the user experience folks: we’re always trying to model the mind of the user. That’s why it’s critical that we test our design solutions with people. The value of user testing becomes evident when we put our designs in front of users and they relate to them in a completely different way.

But before user testing, good designers first seek to understand the relationship users currently have with a particular product or service. Next, we envision the relationships that users might like and manifest that narrative in a design solution. When people engage with services, their journey across service touchpoints is essentially that narrative. The same is true for software: a user’s experience is a narrative for himself; it’s the story from the time he opens the program until that moment he closes it.

So narrative is another critical component of design; after all, “humans are storytelling animals and story is how we make sense of the world around us; how we make sense of experience.”

Jamy tells a story about Tropicana’s rebranding disaster and mentions implications for design. He says that “good design is a brand attribute. All of it requires empathy. All of it requires getting out beyond the thing and understanding what the human experience is at the other end.”

With that said, he asks for a volunteer from the audience to participate in a demonstration of empathy.

He explains to the audience that the participant is going to have a unique magical experience and all of them in the audience are going to get to see how it works. And that’s precisely where the sense of empathy comes in: to see if you can imagine what the participant’s experience is as it unfolds.

What follows is an entertaining and fascinating demonstration that you absolutely have to see for yourself.

Finally, Jamy leaves us with a bit of wisdom apropos for magicians, con artists, and designers alike:

“Magicians fall in love with the idea of magic at a typically young age, between 7 and 10, and we spend our lives trying to recreate that experience for other people, and the better we get at recreating it, the less we are able to experience it for ourselves, so magicians are left eventually to basically experiencing magic vicariously through the eyes and emotions of our audience.

She [the participant in his demonstration] had a unique magical experience. We got to enjoy watching it, but she had an experience that is forever denied to the rest of us because of the burden of knowledge. We can never have that experience for the rest of our lives.”

Thanks a lot, Jamy.

The opening line references Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction, which also wrote about recently, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Seth believes the converse also is true, that “any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

The interview is short but sweet and gets right to the heart of the matter, that “magic allows someone to have complete mastery over the environment around them and the ability to do things that aren’t possible. In many ways, technology has the same goal.”

I suspected that designing a magic trick might be something like designing a service, so I was quite pleased when I saw this last bit from Seth:

“Start by imagining what you would do if you could do anything. Then work backward from the desired effect or outcome, step by step. Brainstorm with people in a completely different domain and study the minutiae of everything involved: the tiniest detail may lead to a breakthrough. And lastly, just wait. The best tricks take years to germinate, until one day they materialize, as if by magic.”

It’s really no surprise that he was a guest speaker at the 2009 Gel Conference. After all, Jamy has offered advice to designers before.

This talk, however, was much more focused on an especially interesting topic: empathy.

So, what does a magician know about empathy? I guess it depends on the magician. What follows is a two-part exposition of his talk, laden with quotes and references to texts that I’m currently tracking down for future posts.

–

What is empathy? It’s knowing the mind of another person.

And it turns out empathy is common amongst magicians and designers. In order for a magician to effectively deceive his spectator, he must know the mind of his spectator. Similarly, for a designer to effectively engage, satisfy, and delight her users, she must know the mind of her users.

So how does one know the mind of another person? First, one must have a consciousness of that mind.

Consider what psychologists and philosophers call the theory of mind or the ability to attribute mental states to others (e.g. intents, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc). Magicians (and designers) use this information to inform themselves about behavior; that is, by putting themselves in another person’s shoes and empathizing, they are able to know and thus deceive their spectators/users.

Jamy quotes nun and philosopher Edith Stein, “Empathy…is the experience of foreign consciousness in general… This is how man grasps the psychic life of his fellow man.”

So, if anything you create has an end user in mind, then theory of mind is important. And remember to act ethically; Jamy maintains that magicians (and I would add designers) use deception in an authentic and ethical manner.

Magician Karl Germain: “Conjuring is the most honest of all professions, for the conjurer promises to deceive, and then does so.”

Reginald Scott’s 16th century text entitled “Discovery of Witchcraft” wasn’t a book about magic, but a book about critical thinking. Magicians have long since spoken out against people who use their tools to manipulate other people’s view of the world. Even Harry Houdini was known to bust seance mediums from time to time.

Jamy compares magicians to con artists, who have to “really get inside the subject’s head and manipulate not just the victim’s thinking but also his emotional response,” a reference to Magician Whit Hadyn’s thoughts on con artists.

We will return to this idea of emotional response and empathy in Part II. But clearly, you can’t engage in deception without having theory of mind, because you’re inducing false belief.

And, empathy is a critical skill for magicians, con artists, and designers.

Be sure to check out Part II, and I’ve included additional quotes + a fun fact below.

–

QUOTES

Magician Roberto Giobbi (paraphrased): Magic doesn’t occur in the magician’s hands or in the props that he’s handling or on the platform he’s standing; magic only occurs in the heads of the spectators.

Magician Peter Samelson: “I can’t really do magic. I can only help you see it.”

Magician Henning Nelms: “Forcing spectators to interpret what they see and hear in ways which they know are false comes as close to genuine magic as we are likely to get.”

FUN FACT

Q: How old do you have to be before you have theory of mind?

A: According to a recent study, infants as early as 6 months partake of willful deception (e.g. false crying/laughter to get attention), and at 8 months even more elaborate concealing of behaviors.

As I sifted through the piles of boxes, I stumbled upon my old shoebox of magic tricks. As soon as I saw it, the memories came rushing back to me. I was 10 years old and about to attend my first magic workshop, stoked to be that kid on the block who would amaze his friends with my sleight-of-hand skills, and clearly I needed an impressive chest of magic tricks. So I took an old British Knights shoebox, wrapped it in paper, and decorated it with a sharpie.

The box and all of its contents were still in tact, but the memory of that first workshop had faded. What was still vivid, however, were the 3 Cardinal Rules of Magic, written in big white letters on the chalkboard.

3 Cardinal Rules of Magic

1. Never do the same trick twice.
2. Never tell people how the trick is done.
3. Never let the audience see your secret preparation.

One variation of these rules, from the Wikipedia entry on Magic (illusion), is the Magician’s Oath:

“As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless that one swears to uphold the Magician’s Oath in turn. I promise never to perform any illusion for any non-magician without first practicing the effect until I can perform it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic.”

I imagine there are many other variations of rules and sworn oaths, but the message is clear: secrecy is to be valued above all.

–

And for those of you wondering what happened with my magic shoebox… rest assured. It’s on its way to Los Angeles.

I often cite one of his Three Four Laws of Prediction, the one that mentions magic, so I felt it appropriate to include a post on the subject. So, without further ado:

Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Four Laws of Prediction

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
4. For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. (Amended in 1999)

…

Commentary from the designer’s perspective to follow.

The article opens up with a trick. Penn and Teller call it “Looks Simple” and at first it doesn’t appear to be a trick at all. But this seemingly ordinary activity – Teller stamps out a cigarette, adjusts his hat, and lights a new cigarette – is actually a demonstration of the seven basic principle of magic: palm, ditch, steal, simulation, load, misdirection, and switch.

“People take reality for granted. Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”

Magicians, since the dawn of time (of magicians), have been capitalizing on the limitations of human perception. The phrase “the hand is quicker than the eye” has long been attributed to them, but it’s simply an aphorism; today, neuroscientists are trying to actually prove it. As it turns out, Teller joined a group of researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute to look at the neuroscience of magic. Their work culminated in a paper titled Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic, a topic for another blog post.

What many people don’t realize is that sleight of hand magic is essentially a form of experimental psychology.

Penn and Teller’s variant of the classic “Cups and Balls” is an excellent example. They use clear cups to create the illusion of transparency; that is, they let the audience actually see how the trick is performed. Sort of. While the audience may be able to see through the cups, limitations of human cognition prevent them from actually perceiving how the trick is performed. If believability is simply a matter of providing enough “proof” to support your “claim” then these guys have gone above and beyond what’s needed to fool the audience. But by doing so, they create a sense of authenticity in that their sleight of hand skills are exceptional and something to be valued. By letting their audience experience transparency and authenticity, they’re setting up the rest of their show for success.

“Even when we know we’re going to be tricked, we still can’t see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level.”

One phenomenon they reference in the article is change blindness, illustrated in a video by British psychologist Richard Wiseman. Watch it before reading on.

What the video validates is that attention is like a spotlight; when we’re focused very intently on something, we become oblivious to even obvious changes outside its narrow beam. Misdirection, one of the seven basic principles of magic, is an exploitation of that phenomenon. All you have to do is point that spotlight at the wrong place at the right time.

Any amateur sleight of hand magician performing for his friends knows that they “aren’t suspending their disbelief, they’re trying to expose you as a scam artist.” It’s the rhetoric of magic; a magician must sell his audience a lie even as they know they’re being lied to. How does one do this? Make the illusion feel more real than the truth. Increase the proof or reduce the claim.

The article goes on to describe a particular finding documented in the academic paper Teller co-authored; specifically, that when we see a hand moving in a straight line, we automatically look toward the end point. When a hand moves in a semicircle, however, we have some serious limitations. This is only one of many examples of magicians educating scientists.

Teller hopes science will one day contribute insights that magicians could leverage to create new tricks. I’m hoping these insights help us design more compelling services.

…

If you’re still reading, then I assume you came back to see what I have to say about it, so here goes.

Mystery is everywhere.

Activities that were once meaningful – acquiring skill, exerting effort, achieving true understanding – have become a burden, impeding our ability to get on with our lives.

JJ attributes this (in part) to the “Age of Immediacy.”

What he’s referring to is that aha moment without the context. Think about a joke’s punch line or a magic trick’s big flourish. The setup is as much of a thrill as the result (and performance matters). The point is, there’s “discovery to be made and wonder to be had on the journey that not only enrich the ending but in many ways define it.”

He goes on to invalidate the notion that browsing iTunes is an equivalent activity to rummaging through bins of albums at your local music store. What’s missing are all of the contexts along the way: all of the possible interactions with people, products, and environments. What’s missing is the possibility to discover something. And I might add experience something.

More on having an experience later.

JJ is clearly no luddite, he made Star Trek after all. Rather, he believes technology has made us thankless. He cites spoilers as an example, and I can certainly relate. As a huge fan of LOST, I’m often engaged in conversations about how it will end, or what it’s all about, and yes, I certainly crave that resolution. But I’ve made a deliberate effort to appreciate the journey, and those who have contributed to these LOST conversations have probably heard me say that at some point.

If I found out right now how it ended, the final chapter of my experience of LOST would be destroyed. And that may not matter to those who’ve casually followed the series, but I would ask then, why did you watch it all these years?

Remember Cloverfield? Despite what you may think about the film itself, you’ve got to admit that the advertising campaigns were pretty cool. Nobody knew anything about that movie. And I bet most of them (including myself) were pretty excited to find out by going to see the movie. JJ asserts that this deliberate experiment (to be ultra-secretive about the movie) proved what everyone already knows, that having all the information isn’t always better.

He goes on to tell an entertaining story from his childhood twenties where he and his best friend are trying to reach the end screen of Super Mario Bros. 2 and, as he suggests in the first line of this article, the story ends with cheating.

So the moral of the story? Skipping ahead lessens the experience, diminishes the joy, and makes the accomplishment that much duller.

His final point has practical value for us designers:

“Never underestimate process. The experience of the doing really is everything. The ending should be the end of that experience, not the experience itself.”

And with that, I end this post with something JJ begins with:

“I urge you to dig. Give in to the unknown for a while and ponder the mystery. It’s worth it.”

The article is titled We Can Measure the Power of Charisma and it’s structured much like a scientific experiment: Pentland claims it’s possible to predict who will succeed in competitive business situations without knowing what they have to offer. HBR says: defend your research!

So how can they make such accurate predictions? Basically, they’ve created devices that can record social signals – tone of voice, gesticulation, proximity to others, and more – and use this data to make their predictions. They found that honest signals – these non-verbal cues that social species use to coordinate themselves – are powerful indicators of success. “It makes sense,” he says, “that the communication signals we used for millennia would be so powerful.”

Here’s what else they’ve found:

The more successful people are more energetic.
They talk more, but they also listen more.
They spend more face-to-face time with others.
They pick up cues from others, draw people out, and get them to be more outgoing.
It’s not just what they project that makes them charismatic; it’s what they elicit.

Put simply: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

But magicians and designers already know this. The question is, do service providers?

And it may not be sleight of hand, but the article does end with the mention of magic: “Because we can now measure it, social intuition is no longer magic; it’s now quantitative science.”

As I mentioned in a previous post, David has a unique perspective on magic. Like most magicians, he strives to create images that make people stop and think. But this, unlike most magicians, often leads him to challenge himself to do things that doctors say are not possible.

“As a magician, I think everything is possible, and I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others.”

So in his search for ways to hold his breath past the point that doctors would consider a person brain dead, he tried several methods to create the illusion of holding his breath beyond what is believed possible. One method involved inserting a large tube in through his mouth (he shows video footage that makes you cringe).

Turns out, he went with the craziest idea of them all: to actually do it.

The rest of the TED Talk is really interesting and entertaining, but the fact that he chose to actually hold his breath to break the record makes me think about authenticity.

Magicians create illusions; when a magician performs a trick, you experience a continuum of deliberately designed interactions and occurrences. You know you’re being tricked but you’re entertained by it, you experience wonder and it is good.

But David Blaine is doing something very different here. There’s no illusion. You experience something truly magical, the no-longer-impossible-because-I-just-did-it. So what happens when you know you’re not being tricked, what impact does this authenticity have on your experience? And, is it repeatable?

Not that he had to make his process transparent for us to believe he really held his breath to break the record, but this TED Talk demonstrates that David Blaine’s magic is in its authenticity.

He ends his talk with a definition of magic:

“It’s practice. It’s training. It’s experimenting. While pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be.”