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by jenks

Good For Your Health: Design Philosophy From The Technology of Healing

The Doctor, by Luke Fildes

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I design healthcare experiences for a living. This includes:

  • Designing experiences for patients
  • Designing experiences that facilitate the relationship between providers and their patients
  • Designing solutions for leveraging large swathes of medical data to improve health outcomes at population scale

A lot of work is being done to bring design thinking to healthcare. I’d like to explore how healthcare can be a source for design philosophy. Not because healthcare has experience design figured out — not by a long shot, obviously. As an industry, healthcare is often rife with misaligned, and even malign incentives that can lead to awful results. But as a discipline of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, healthcare is the endeavor of healing. The applications of healing — physical, mental, psychological— are themselves technologies. And I believe the technology of healing can offer a novel perspective to reexamine how we think about broader technology design.

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Design is about choices.

Earlier this year, The Center for Humane Technology, an organization founded by former Google Design Ethicist, Tristan Harris, to “align technology with humanity’s best interests,” partnered with Moment, an app that helps people track their screen time, to find out how people feel after using different apps. They collected data from 200,000 iPhone users and ranked the apps that made people feel the happiest, and the ones that made them most regret the time they’d spent there.

What’s interesting about what their findings reveal is that four of the top ten apps that make people feel happiest about having used them are designed specifically to facilitate mental / physical health practices.

Source: Center for Humane Technology

Zero of the top 15 apps that make people most unhappy are.

. . .

 

The history of technology design has traditionally been about the application of persuasion practices — exploiting humans’ cognitive and psychological vulnerabilities to influence their behavior.

Here is just a sampling of the product design canon that has ended up on my own bookshelf:

Persuasive design has provided the educational foundation for technology creators and its essentially unquestioned (until recently) behavioralist philosophy has wound up directly embedded into the products they develop. Products that have gone on to affect how billions of people now experience their lives. At an existential level technology remakes culture: the philosophy that proliferates through the products we use in turn defines the values we absorb, the behaviors we adopt, and the social norms we internalize by using them. But in a very practical sense, persuasive design philosophy has simply provided a framework for defining which design choices are considered valuable, and which are not.

Healing offers a different modality through which to evaluate design choices, and expands the spectrum of available options for those choices.

What can we learn from healing technologies, both timeless and cutting edge, to inform a design philosophy for the kinds of products people are happy to have in their lives?

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1. Pain Reduction (vs. “delight”)

“The quality of emotional responses elicited by a product is a measure of its delightfulness,” according to UX Magazine. “Delightful is the highest level of UX maturity.”

Source: UX Magazine “UX Maturity Model”

But is it?

What if, as Erika Hall suggests, “Creating ‘delightful’ user experiences is actually “user-hostile when it wrongly presumes that your customer wants to be emotionally involved with your service at all.”

Put another way:

“Fast and invisible are often the better parts of delight,” Hall adds.

In other words, pain reduction can be more valuable — and pleasurable — than emotional engagement with a designed experience.

Rather than thinking about how we can more delightfully coerce people into doing something, how do we instead design to take away the pain standing in their way?

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2. Connectedness (vs. “contacts”)

A 2015 study out of Carnegie Mellon found that participants with a strong sense of social support developed less severe symptoms when exposed to the common cold than those who felt socially deprived. A 2010 study examining over 300,000 people around the world found that low levels of social support posed a premature death risk comparable to smoking and alcohol consumption. The World Health Organization has even identified social support networks as a primary determinant of health.

And yet, more than one-third of Americans over the age of 45 report feeling lonely. The prevalence of loneliness is especially high among those over 65 and under 25. Looking at high school students’ feelings of loneliness tracked since the 1990s, an interesting inflection point stands out:

Source: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

The uptick in teen loneliness begins immediately after the release of the iPhone.

“We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization,” writes former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, “yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.”

How is it that our unprecedented social technologies have exacerbated our feelings of alienation?

While a growing body of evidence is revealing the health benefits of meaningful connectedness, design choices have been made to dope us into a haze of superficial “contacts” — weak ties and surface interactions.

Image source: How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist

Considering the impact that meaningful connectedness has on our health, how do we design for experiences that facilitate it?

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3. Precision Medicine (vs. “happy path”)

Precision medicine is an emerging medical discipline of tailoring customized treatment and prevention approaches based on a patient’s specific genetic information and environment.

Advertising technology and feed filter algorithms have already scaled precision-targeting to create personalized, alternative media realities. But product design is still largely reliant on the starting point of a default workflow — a “happy path.”

Yet the happy path can not only fail users but actually create suffering.

As Eric Meyer wrote in 2014:

I didn’t go looking for grief this afternoon, but it found me anyway. And I have designers and programmers to thank for it. In this case, the designers and programmers are somewhere at Facebook.

“Eric, here’s what your year looked like!”

A picture of my daughter, who is dead. Who died this year.

Yes, my year looked like that. True enough. My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl. It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

The design is for the ideal user, the happy, upbeat, good-life user. In creating this Year in Review app, there wasn’t enough thought given to cases like mine, or anyone who had a bad year. If I could fix one thing about our industry, just one thing, it would be that: to increase awareness of and consideration for the failure modes, the edge cases, the worst-case scenarios.

The precision medicine concept applied to design could mean avoiding this kind of UX cruelty.

In healthcare, “edge cases” can still have implications for millions of people. To help simplify the complexity of designing for an environment like this I developed a workflow planning tool at athenahealth. The goal is to easily document and account for the various situations in which users may find themselves.

Understanding the implications of distinct workflows on their own terms, rather than as deviations from a default, makes it easier to step away from the mental model of a “happy path” and design for a more inclusive range of real-life user scenarios.

How else can precision medicine thinking allow product designers to reframe “edge cases” and “outlier” scenarios and find scalable approaches for addressing the needs of diverse users?

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4. Population Health (vs. “engagement”)

Population Health is an approach to healthcare that is based on evaluating health outcomes at population scale, and driving informed clinical decisions to improve those outcomes. The sheer amount of data we now have available and the tools with which we can wield it make population health a hot new area for healthcare, but Florence Nightingale was using these same methods out on nineteenth century, Crimean battlefields to assess causes of preventable deaths among soldiers:

Florence Nightingale’s 1850’s infographic skills

You can’t optimize for what you don’t measure. So what ARE we measuring?

Clicks. Likes. Shares. Comments… Engagements. Often, simply whatever is the most obvious event metric to record and track — not necessarily the most salient or meaningful.

How happy are our users after using our product? How is their well-being affected? How much less pain and more meaningfulness have we contributed?

“Metrics,” Niels Hoven writes, “are leading indicators, not end goals. One of my favorite stories is from a friend who worked on improving the search feature at a major tech company. Their target metric was to increase the number of searches per user, and the most efficient way to do that was to make search results worse. My friend likes to think that his team resisted that temptation, but you can never be totally sure of these things.”

Metrics are, as Hoven adds, “just heuristics, actionable proxies that could be measured on a short time scale” They are not sufficient “stand-ins for long-term product health.”

Nor, for that matter, for the long term health of our user population.

We have been very busy measuring, and optimizing for engagement / user actions. How do we measure the health of our user populations in order to achieve better quality outcomes?

. . .

UX RX

Y-Combinator, the famous startup incubator that has helped create successes like AirBnB, DropBox, Instacart, Reddit, and more, has a motto:

And the thing is….people WANT less pain, they want more connectedness, and better health! These are not things people DON’T want. They’re just often not what’s being designed for.

Taking a cue from Harris’s years of work on the Time Well Spent movement, earlier this year Mark Zuckerberg announced his intent to shift Facebook’s product directive towards “encouraging the most meaningful social interactions.” He wanted Facebook to become “more focused on trying to measure and have people tell us what is creating the most meaningful interactions in their lives. Not just on Facebook. It could be a message that you have on Messenger or WhatsApp, but it could also be that you see something on Facebook and have a conversation about that in the world with someone who’s meaningful to you, and that’s something that we need to understand.”

Looking to the technology of healing as a source of design philosophy isn’t about sacrificing commercial viability. It’s about employing a different framing for what people want, and a different way of thinking about our priorities in the way we design the products that shape people’s lives.

    



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by jenks

Designing For People Who Don’t Want To Use Your Product

Who here wants a colonoscopy?

If you don’t happen to know the details, a colonoscopy is an exam of the inner lining of your large intestine, which helps find ulcers, colon polyps, tumors, and areas of inflammation or bleeding.

Doesn’t that just make you want to run out and get one?

So, don’t everyone all jump up at once.

As a Sr. UX Designer at Athena Health one of the problems I’m working on is figuring out how to get patients to become more active and informed participants in their own healthcare. Colorectal cancer, for example, is one of the few kinds that can be prevented with screening, and early detection saves tens of thousands of lives per year. But you’d be hard pressed to find someone for whom it’s anything but the pressure of a doctor’s authority that wins out over personal aversion to getting one in the end. (Phrasing).

In consumer tech you operate under the assumption that people are going to luuurve your product. To get anyone else excited about what you’re working on, you have to drink your own kool-aid about how awesome and innovative and insanely great your photo app or fashion marketplace or brand activation or whatever is. (Don’t worry, I’m sure people want to use your product.)

But in the landscape of technology that actually matters to people’s health — a solution to surface targeted, preventative health services recommendations for patients, such as a colonoscopy, for example— you have to go in with a clear-eyed understanding of the reasons why people AREN’T going to love it.

For example, they might not love it because:

  • It’s embarrassing
  • It’s painful
  • It’s frightening
  • It’s taboo
  • It invites an existential confrontation with the fragile nature of your own mortality

Gah.

Like, gah, though.

UX is often about solving logic problems. How do you put the right elements in the right place to get people from point A to point B, and how to get them there faster? It’s a logistics issue. Make it simplified, more navigable, more intuitive, more efficient. But emotion is a peskily inescapable part of the human condition. It can’t be sanded off. No matter how frictionless the experience, the emotional aspects must be addressed on their own terms. In fact, emotions aren’t just the deterrents, they are also the drivers that can motivate us to point B in the first place.

So how do we create UX solutions to mitigate these road blocks and leverage emotional drivers that can help reinvent experiences people would rather avoid?

 

1. LIFESTYLE

“People are already forced to spend thousands of dollars a year on medical care and health insurance anyway — so why not reframe it as a lifestyle product?”

 — Zoom Wants Health Care to Be More Like Visiting An Apple Store (FastCompany)

What makes lifestyle such a compelling driver is that it appeals directly to our sense of who we are. We do the things and buy the things and use the things that are congruent with our personal identity and communicate our identity choices to others.

If lifestyle forces could transform a medical device that sits on your nose and obscures your face into a hipster fashion accessory, is there opportunity to do the same for other healthcare experiences?

Dave Sanders, a Portland Oregon-based M.D., co-founded a network of walk-in clinics called Zoomcare to do exactly that.

From FastCompany:

It sounds like hooey, but it wouldn’t be the first time that savvy product design has transformed a boring service into an object of desire. The Nest thermostat,Tesla Powerwall home battery, and Google OnHub Wi-Fi router are all placing similar bets. Oscar is already trying to give health insurance a design facelift.

[Zoom’s] goal is to implement an alternative-universe version of urban health care — driven by mobile-first technology, integrated UX design, and on-demand “retail”-style service — alongside the existing legacy system of hospitals, clinics, and insurance companies

“Health care is one of the largest household spending categories other than a car or food,” Sanders says. “For that kind of investment, it needs to be a life-enhancing platform, not just a commodity or a utility. Oh, and by the way, when you’re really sick, it’s got your back too.”

 

2. EMPOWERMENT

“Cake is the easiest way to discover, share, and store your end of life preferences.”

 — JoinCake.com

Cake is a Boston-based startup tackling preparation for the most dreaded life-stage of all—death.

How do you want to be remembered? Would you rather live as long as possible or prioritize quality of life? Have you made financial plans? Just thinking about our own mortality is terrifying already, but the exceedingly complicated and fragmented current state of end-of-life planning makes the whole process not just odious but tedious.

The Cake team believes it should be easier, and to that end have created an app that aims to make end-of-life planning “a piece of cake.” Users are able to fill out “Cake Cards” that ask key questions to quickly illuminate personal values and priorities, both to themselves and their loved ones. Users can simply agree or disagree with the option on each card and go through as many cards as they feel like. If this approach feels lullingly familiar, it’s by design. By repositioning a universally daunting process through the lens of preference-setting (and, oh, hey, the familiar, binary choice UI of Tinder actually put to use for good) Cake’s approach creates a sense of agency and empowerment in an experience otherwise literally defined by our mortal limitations.

 

3. MINDFULNESS

“Of those who did the mindfulness training, 43.6 percent reported a meaningful reduction in pain 26 weeks later. That’s compared to 26.6 percent in the usual care group. ”

 — For Chronic Low Back Pain, Mindfulness Can Beat Painkillers (NPR)

Since Jonathan Kabat Zinn’s seminal research in the 1980s on The clinical use of mindfulness meditation for the self-regulation of chronic pain, mindfulness practices have been slowly gaining traction as a viable method for pain reduction. More recently, the growing focus on mindfulness as a means for mitigating the psychological jungle warfare of Western life has served to further promote its uses in Western medicine.

Earlier this year The Journal of the American Medical Association endorsed mindfulness meditation as a treatment for chronic pain, and an alternative to the relentless tide of pain-killer prescriptions that have helped fuel a full on epidemic of opioid addiction.

Mindfulness meditation cultivates a different relationship to our experiences, identifying, labeling, and discerning sensations — pleasant, unpleasant , or neutral— rather than blindly reacting to them. This practice helps to modulate the nature and orientation of our attention toward pain, and our corresponding emotional response, which can reduce its impact.

Last year an app I designed for a physical therapy technology client allowed patients to rate and provide feedback on how painful or difficult their prescribed exercises and stretches were to complete. The approach aimed to encourage greater body awareness and mindfulness to support the PT treatment regimen, but it has application beyond rehabilitation. Especially for the nascent space of wearables and fitness technologies, incorporating mindfulness features can support a greater overall physical and psychological well-being that these devices can help their users achieve.

 

4. NORMALIZATION

“It’s knowing ‘hey, there’s thousands of people who are experiencing this exact thing.’ I just feel less alone because of the online community.”

 — How Tumblr Became a Source for Mental Health Care (The Guardian)

Normalizing stigmatized or alienating experiences has been the lynchpin of support groups since their inception. Even informal groups can have significant impact. “Research suggests that when you put people in a cancer treatment together, their experience and hope for the next treatment improves because it’s a support network,” says Michael Pukszta, leader of CannonDesign, which recently redesigned the M Health clinic and surgery center at the University of Minnesota along such design principles.

One of the redeeming aspects of social technology is, in fact, its capacity to connect us with others who understand and relate to our experiences. Mea Pearson, a 24-year-old with borderline personality disorder, went to Tumblr seeking advice after her diagnosis, and ended up starting her own blog, shitborderlinesdo, to create a more positive and nuanced online depiction of her illness. Today, her Tumblr blog has nearly 20,000 daily visitors.

Embracing its growing popularity as a mental health support forum, Tumblr has gone so far as to create dedicated experiences for people searching for a word such as depression. “Is Everything Okay?” reads a message, with links to crisis intervention programs.

But perhaps the most beneficial part of what the platform can offer is a community for people experiencing illness to realize that there are others going through the same things they are, reducing the shame and fear of suffering in isolation.

Building for features that enable normalization has even led Patients Like Me to completely reimagine what crowdsourcing technology can do when married with healthcare. The Boston-based company began as a support destination where people could compare treatments, symptoms, and experiences. With this vast amount of self-reporting from actual patients, it has evolved into a health data platform that seeks to transform the way the medical industry conducts research and develops treatments to improve patient care.

 

5. ACCOUNTABILITY

“70% of the participants who sent weekly updates to a friend reported successful goal achievement, compared to 35% of those who kept their goals to themselves.”

— Unexpected Lessons From Making Your To-Do List Public (FastCompany)

While telling people your goals might actually lull you into a sense of complacency, sharing your progress — the fruits of your dogged determination in pursuit of said goal — may make you more likely to actually accomplish it. According to The American Psychological Association, “If you are trying to achieve a goal, the more often that you monitor your progress, the greater the likelihood that you will succeed. Your chances of success are even more likely if you report your progress publicly or physically record it.”

This is a technique that’s been applied for weight loss and fitness products for ages. Weilos, a social media platform for people to talk about their weight loss and fitness goals and share selfies of their progress, found that users who posted progress photos documenting their weight loss lost .93 lbs. more per week, compared to when they didn’t use the sharing platform. Complete, an iOS app that allows users to share their to-do lists with a community found in their first 5 months that those who publicly declared their intentions on the network were four times more likely to complete their tasks.

Building features to support and encourage this kind of social accountability could have significant implications when it comes to medication adherence and, ultimately, outcomes. Consider how much more motivated patients may be to close the gaps in their preventative health if their family members and loved ones had visibility into their progress.

 

6. HUMOR

“They’re real … and they’re either hilarious or disturbing, depending on your sensibilities. At the very least, we think you’ll agree this video is more effective than any peeling doctor’s office poster.”

— Here’s How You Show a Breast Self-Exam on Social Networks That Ban Female Nipples (Adweek)

Laughter may be the best medicine and prevention the best cure, so Argentinian Breast Cancer charity, MACMA, and creative agency DAVID, decided to put these two, time-tested remedies together in their recently released breast cancer awareness PSA.

“Women’s boobs, particularly their nipples, are censored in certain social networks,” a voiceover says as a woman unbuttons her shirt. “Even when showing how to perform breast self-examinations to detect early breast cancer — ”

“ — But we found boobs that aren’t censored — ”

In steps a nude, male torso with a pair of “manboobs.” The woman proceeds to demonstrate how to perform a breast self exam on this stand-in, like a sex-ed teacher using a banana.

The initiative cheekily upends anatomy taboos — for both male and female bodies — while promoting preventative health through humor and irreverence.

So, in the end….

    



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by jenks

Modern Millennial

modernmillennial

If you live in LA, you should go to the Modern Millennial exhibit. As soon as you possibly can, too, cuz it’s over in 6 days. I’ll explain where and how to find it in a minute, but first I want to tell you what it is.

Modern Millennial is an art installation / existential performance art piece / media experiment in the spirt of Exit Through The Gift Shop / I’m Still Here, except the theme is about being a person going through the modern experience.

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Modern Millennial began with a Kickstarter.

Obviously.

The project was funded, and the exhibit installed, so now what’s happening is during the month of September a dude named Moses Storm is living inside an art exhibit in an industrial loft in #DTLA. The loft is filled throughout with installations that comprise the Modern Millennial exhibit, and Storm, the eponymous modern millennial, living life in said loft, is himself an interactive installation as well. It’s funny and weird and smart and awesome.

Modern Millennial seems, at first, like it will be a lampoon of millennial clichés — and it is definitely that — but it’s also something so much more interesting and introspective and sincere in the process.

“The Modern Millennial,” proclaims the Kickstarer, “Is a game-changing form of immersive performance art in which roaming audiences experience epic insights into a generation.”

But, of course, Millennials are already the most poked, prodded, packaged, positioned, market-tested, focus grouped, classified, and stereotyped generation in history. And of course, the buying and selling of ourselves to ourselves is already part of our Millennial experience, and each of us in the attendee target audience is a full-time object in our own, modern media experiment.

Of course, that’s part of the point. The art and the artist are both keenly aware they are the results of the same generational forces they are ridiculing.

Or maybe not ridiculing at all.

There are, in a sense, three phases to the Modern Millennial exhibit. First, there is the digital precursor that you encounter before  the physical space of the show. Then there is the in-person experience of the exhibit itself. And finally there is the digital afterlife of the exhibit, living on through shared photo content and hashtag feeds. Each of these three aspects comes with its own distinct tone and role in the narrative arc of the Modern Millennial experience, and likewise, the modern millennial experience.

 

Phase 1.

Google “Modern Millennial” and the first thing you’ll find is the Kickstarter.

 

A typical cocktail of narcissism, hype, and jargon, it’s also unmistakably meta: taking its absurd premise seriously while also mocking itself, Millennials, (Kickstarer campaigns), everything:

Our goal with this piece is to show a different side of Millennials. And prove that not all of us are lazy narcissist who are just looking for a handout.

Some cool stuff happens if we hit our stretch goals.

If reached, we will tour with the exhibit. I am thinking Paris!

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Phase 2.

But in the physical space of the exhibit, the the mood is notably different. It’s exposed, honest, intimate. The way things look online is not how they feel in person.

Obviously.

nimblewill
@nimblewill

 

morganisethnic
@morganisthenic

 

The cynicism and detachment of digital distance break down into vulnerability and sincerity in physical space. So many of the pieces are an exploration of existential yearning for meaning and connection.

10655043_679790918767878_1959917424_n@babiejenks

 

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@iamstevienelson

 

actressamanda
@actressamanda

 

shelbyfero
@shelbyfero

 

radojcich
@radojcich

 

The Wall of Activism, for example, is a usual suspects lineup of viral sincerity eruptions.

snowcone88
@snowcone88

 

It’s impossible not to view a LiveStrong Bracelet, a Stop Kony poster, a bucket full of ice water (among others), with a cynical side-eye. But when you see them displayed this way, all cataloged together, they are also inescapably earnest. These recurring, massive social hysterias of optimism and the dream of collective empowerment; this ceaseless desire to care.

The most popular piece in the show (based on frequency of Instagram appearances) is also the most inscrutable.

 

skiparnold
@skiparnold

 

Is it a comment about being unafraid to come out as an artist?  To claim a sincere artist identity in the midst of a storm of irony?

 

hoorayjen
@hoorayjen

 

Or is it a jab at the pretentiousness of the concept? An ironic joke about such an analog anachronism?

 

kmahair
@kmahair

 

Does such a thing as a “serious artist” still even exist, or is the popularity of the piece akin to that of an endangered animal on display at the zoo?

 

peterhinz
@peterhinz

Is it for real, or is it a joke?

 

taysprizzle
@taysprizzle

 

Does it matter?

 

 alimerlina
@alimerlina

 

Phase 3.

For an exhibit titled, #ModernMillennial, the show itself is remarkably, unremarkably lo-fi. The Modern Millennial is less infatuated with technology than with humanity. And yet the experience is inherently hybridized with digital DNA.

Obviously.

babiejenks1
@babiejenks

 

In 2014, our digital technology is increasingly hurtling towards pervasive invisibility, insinuating itself into our every waking moment with the banal inevitability of electricity. And yet, it’s the human interactions with the art pieces, through the lens of digital media, that turn them on like a switch. Without Instagram, or at the very least the vernacular of Instagram, much of Modern Millennial wouldn’t really make any sense.

“Stand Here Do Nothing” is built to basically only really work once it’s in a photo you’ve posted up somewhere:

lucifergoosifer
@lucifergoosifer

 

gardenofart_
@gardenofart_

 

Likewise, “Like This So I know You Still Exist.”

erikaheidewald
@erikaheidewald

 

danielcarberry
@danielcarberry

 

Taking and posting these photos is at once  a cliché and an act of participating in a piece of art about a cliché.

emilyfaye2
@emilyfaye2

But it’s ok. Don’t worry. You can’t help it. This stereotypical experience — it’s universal.

 


@cassydbadiiiiiiiie
 

Modern Millennial sincerely delivers on what its ironic (or not) Kickstarter promised: it captures the truths our contemporary condition. And it does so with humor and humanity. There’s certainly plenty to mock about the times we live in, but we’ve got to have compassion for our predicament, too.

Obviously.

babiejenks2@babiejenks

 

 

How to get to the Modern Millennial Exhibit.

In a time where basically everything is accessible online, the show is almost stringently unfindable. You stumble into it like a niche forum from the ’90s. We used to discover things online. Now the only way to access a real sense of discovery is through things hidden offline. So go:

 

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by jenks

The Last Exit To The Millennium

“Those of us who watched Kids as adolescents,” writes Caroline Rothstein, in her Narrative.ly piece Legends Never Die, “Growing up in an era before iPhones, Facebook, and Tiger Moms, had our minds blown from wherever we were watching–whether it was the Angelika Film Center on the Lower East Side or our parents’ Midwestern basements. We were captivated by the entirely unsupervised teens smoking blunts, drinking forties, hooking up, running amok and reckless through the New York City streets…. Two decades after [the] film turned Washington Square skaters into international celebrities, the kids from ‘Kids’ struggle with lost lives, distant friendships, and the fine art of growing up.”

If you came up in the 90’s, you remember Kids. But I’d hardly given it a backward glance in ages. Had it really been two decades? It seemed somehow inconceivable. The cast, none of them professional actors, all plucked from the very streets they skated on, had become fixed in my mind as eternal teenagers, immortalizing a hyperbolized — and yet, not entirely foreign — experience. Kids was grotesque and dirty and self-indulgent and unignorable, and so was high school. Which is where I, and my friends, were at the time. The movie had become internalized. I had entirely forgotten that this was where Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson had come from. Like a rite of passage, it seemed to carry a kind of continuity, like it was something everyone goes through. It seemed disconnected from any kind of evolving timeline.

And yet time had passed. Revisiting the lives of the cast 20 years later, Rothstein writes, “Justin Pierce, who played Casper, took his life in July 2000, the first of several tragedies for the kids. Harold, who played himself in the film and is best remembered for swinging his dick around in the pool scene—he was that kid who wasn’t afraid, who radiated a magnetic and infectious energy both on and off screen—is gone too. He died in February 2006 from a drug-induced heart attack.” Sevigny and Dawson have become successful actors. Others tied to the crew have gone on to lead the skate brand Zoo York, and start a foundation that aims to “use skateboarding as a vehicle to provide inner-city youth with valuable life experiences that nurture individual creativity, resourcefulness and the development of life skills.” But the most striking story for me, however, was of what happened over the past 20 years to the movie’s most profoundly central character:

“I think that Kids is probably the last time you see New York City for what it was on film,” [says, Jon “Jonny Boy” Abrahams.] “That is to me a seminal moment in New York history because right after that came the complete gentrification of Manhattan.”

Kids immortalizes a moment in New York City when worlds collided–“the end of lawless New York,” Eli [Morgan, co-founder of Zoo York] says–before skateboarding was hip, before Giuliani cleaned up, suited up, and wealthy-ed up Manhattan.

“I don’t think anyone else could have ever made that movie,” says Leo [Fitzpatrick, who played the main character, Telly]. “If you made that movie a year before or after it was made, it wouldn’t be the same movie.”

Kids‘ low-budget grit and amateur acting gave it a strange ambivalence. It was neither fully fictional nor fully real. It blurred the line between the two in a way that it itself did not quite fully understand — it was the very, very beginning of “post-Empire,” when such ambiguities would become common — and neither did we. Detached from  the confines of the real and the fictional, it had a sense of also being out of time. But it turns out it was in fact the opposite. Kids was a time capsule. As Jessica [Forsyth] says in the article: “It’s almost like Kids was the dying breath of the old New York.”

It’s a strange thing. One day you wake up and discover that culture has become history. In the end it wasn’t a dramatic disaster or radical new technology that changed the narrative in an instant. It was a transition that happened gradually. The place stands still, and time revolves around it; changes it the way wind changes the topography of dunes.

Just a few days after Rothstein’s piece, I read these truly chilling words in The New York Times:

“The mean streets of the borough that rappers like the Notorious B.I.G. crowed about are now hipster havens, where cupcakes and organic kale rule.”

For current real estate purposes, the block where the Brooklyn rapper Notorious B.I.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace, once sold crack is now well within the boundaries of swiftly gentrifying Clinton Hill, though it was at the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant when he was growing up. Biggie, who was killed under still-mysterious circumstances in 1997, was just one of the many rappers to emerge from Brooklyn’s streets in the ’80s and ’90s. Including successful hardcore rappers, alternative hip-hop M.C.s, respected but obscure underground groups and some — like KRS-One and Gang Starr — who were arguably all of the above, the then-mean streets gave birth to an explosion of hip hop. Among the artists who lived in or hung out in this now gentrified corner of the borough: Not only Jay-Z, but also the Beastie Boys, Foxy Brown, Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, Mos Def and L’il Kim.

For many, the word “Brooklyn” now evokes artisanal cheese rather than rap artists. The disconnect between brownstone Brooklyn’s past and present is jarring in the places where rappers grew up and boasted about surviving shootouts, but where cupcakes now reign. If you look hard enough, the rougher past might still be visible under the more recently applied gloss. And if you want to buy a piece of the action, Biggie’s childhood apartment, a three-bedroom walk-up, was recently listed by a division of Sotheby’s International Realty. Asking price: $725,000.

When we imagine the world of the future, it is invariably a world of science fiction. It’s always, “Here’s what Los Angeles might look like in seven years: swamped by a four-foot rise in sea level, California’s megalopolis of the future will be crisscrossed with a thousand miles of rail transportation. Abandoned freeways will function as waterslides while train passengers watch movies whiz by in a succession of horizontally synchronized digital screens. Foodies will imbibe 3-D-printed protein sculptures extruded by science-minded chefs.”

It’s always impersonal. The future,  even one just seven years away, seems always inhabited entirely by future-people. It’s not a place where we actually imagine….ourselves. Who will we be when the music that speaks to us now becomes “Classic” (Attention deficit break: “Elders react to Skrillex“); when the movies or TV shows or — lets be real, it’s most likely going to be — web content that captures the spirit of  this moment becomes a time capsule instead of a reflection? When once counter-cultural expressions — like skating, or hip hop — become mainstream? Who will we be when there is no longer a mainstream, or a counter-culture, for that matter? And who will the teenagers of this future be when the culture of their youth ages?

The past isn’t a foreign country. It’s our hometown. It’s the place we left, that has become immortalized in our memory the way it was back then. We return one day to discover new buildings have sprung up in empty lots, new people have moved in and displaced the original residents. Some from the old neighborhood didn’t made it out alive. The past has moved while we weren’t looking. It’s no longer where it was at all.

“In the ’80s and ’90s–as strange as it may seem to say this–we had such luxury of stability,” William Gibson, the once science-fiction writer who popularized the word “cyberspace,” and turned natural realist novelist in the 21st-century, said in a 2007 interview. “Things weren’t changing quite so quickly in the ’80s and ’90s. And when things are changing too quickly you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.”

Yet this week, it seems to me the more mysterious our future, the more the past becomes a moving target.

Then again, perhaps it always was.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

highwatermarknewyork
Map of New York City showing the remnants of the 6ft high water line from Hurricane Sandy.
Crom Martial Training, Rockaway Beach. (Source)

 

    



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by jenks

The Top 5 Social Creature Posts Of 2011

If you’re just joining us, here are the top 5 things that happened here this year:

1. Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience — Now With Pictures!
Transmedia is a fancy word for a simple concept: telling stories across multiple platforms. In the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we experience entertainment narratives, however, it’s how we tell the story of our lives. “Your Life Is A Transmedia Exprience,” a slide-show originally created for a panel discussion I led at the MITx FutureM conference in Boston, has become my most popular piece to date, racking up 36,000 views and making it onto the SlideShare homepage. (Note to self: make more slideshows.)

2. Most Bizarre Reference For a Kids Movie, Ever
The same cactuses in the background, the same bug-eyed characters in Hawaiian shirts with grimacy mouths, psychedelically twisty necks, and massively disproportionate heads bobbling on top — the posters for 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and 2011’s Rango, both starring Johnny Depp, bore some uncanny similarities. Not accidentally. TheWrap.com called this analysis, “keenly observant.”

3. Why You’re Wearing Feathers Right Now
This summer feathers had become a staple of every sartorial and tonsorial aspect imaginable. America was experiencing a feather shortage. The situation was getting so dire, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association was lobbying lawmakers about conservation. What’s the story behind the plumage ubiquity? I argued it was tied to the rise of the circus subculture. Alt culture mag, Coilhouse, called my history of the feather underground, “A deft mix of memoir and cultural node mapping.”

4. Charlie Sheen Is Not Crazy
Well, he probably is, but not just the way you think. This year Charlie Sheen became part of a post-Empire continuum exposing the now inherent unreliability of the markers we’d previously depended on to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. In some ways it’s as basic as the shift from the 20th century to the 21st; from analog to digital, from binary to exponential complexity. Reality and not reality exist in the same plane now. It’s enough to make you go crazy. Unless you’re Charlie Sheen. In which case, you simply are as your world is.

5. Google+: Bringing Context Back
Relationships are all about context, but for Facebook that nuance has never quite made sense. Google+, with its aim to “make sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life,” seemed, at least back in the summer anyway, squarely poised to fill that gap. Admittedly, not my most accurate of predictions, but still the 5th most popular Social-Creature post of 2011.

Thanks for reading! See you next year!!

    



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