What Type of Stereo Is That?

Kathy Sierra's written another clear, spot-on piece at Creating Passionate Users. Even though we should be used to such things by now, it's always a pleasure to see quality work.

This time, Kathy's taken on still another of the either/or-based myths that clouds so much of our thinking. This one: geeks hate (reject) marketing; market to geeks at your own peril. This myth has its roots in a relatively simple worldview: either something works, or it looks good. One corollary: if it works, it doesn't matter how it looks, nor do you have to work hard to sell it; smart people see that things work and buy them because of that. Another: if somebody is trying to sell you something (either with words or pretty blinkin' lights) then it must not work worth a damn; only fools fall for that kind of trickery.

Of course, this is utter nonsense, and Kathy uses the most powerful of all metaphors to, ahem, expose it as such: sex. (Why is it that women who blog [notice, I didn't say "women bloggers," or, shudder, "BlogHers"] can so easily use great sexual metaphors to make important points and men can't?)

Sierra says:

A good lover is NOT afraid of finding out what his (or her) partner wants. A good lover does NOT view it as "selling out" if he does things simply because it's what the other person wants. A good lover does NOT believe it's a compromise to try to be more popular, if being popular means making things more stimulating, exciting, sexy, enticing, compelling, appealing, and attractive. A good lover respects that our perception matters. A good lover respects and trusts us. A good lover takes a shower and puts on a clean shirt.

In other words, maybe we should stop assuming that marketing means lying, and start treating our customers/users as people we value and care about enough to make their life a bit more enjoyable. Even if that means little more than sexing up the packaging!

Amen to both the literal and figurative points.

When was it true that extraordinarily functional items weren't also beautiful? The wabi-sabi earnestness of the uncovered disk drive may stir the prurient geek, but things that look great really do work better. I'm not talkin' about puttin' lipstick on a pig; I mean products that reflect great design thinking and execution. Don't trust me, go read Virginia Postrel or Don Norman. Go check out Design Within Reach. Hell, go to an Apple store. And remember: emphasizing the way the Mac looks (cool!) in order to sell a few more boxes doesn't diminish the powerful Unix soul at the core of OS X.

No, the problem is that we've become so polarized (and polarizing) in our thinking that we sometimes find it impossible to imagine ourselves as more than an aggregation of clichés. If you're this, then you can't like that; we don't go to places like that.

So, Kathy appeals to the place that goes beyond all that intellectual masturbation and advises us to pay attention to our own experience; in this case, the experience of being attracted to, and attracting, others. In cases like this I always believe it's a good idea to invite us to get out of our heads and into our bodies (the result of another either/or conundrum we created for ourselves, thank you very much, Monsieur Déscartes!)

Anyway, as we approach the kind of Consilience Edward O. Wilson wrote about, and which Sir Ken Robinson spoke about here, we need to get past these mental barriers and allow ourselves to understand the new world in which words like "elegant" reclaim all their function(al) and form(al) power; in which "either/or" stereotypes wither in the face of new "both/and" integrators; and, in which geeks allow themselves to embrace their inner desire to entice and be enticed, and perhaps, in the process, actually get laid more often.