Consider how computers entered our lives across a few decades: first as far-away leviathans in research labs, then to lonely occupants of special rooms in companies, then to every desk and now to every pocket. Here, there, then suddenly everywhere, and robots seem poised to follow the same curve.

I’ve been waiting to see signs of this wave touching the shore of mass culture, and that happens in a new commercial from Honda. Have a watch.

Honda has not hidden its interest in robotics, with Asimo visiting conferences and other press-heavy events, but has always relegated it to the realm of ‘just research’. With this ad, that gradual rebranding shifts gears, gently humanizing Asimo with Canadian interests, getting us used to the idea of a robot from Honda as part of our lives.

Version 1

I met my good friend Sheila West in a previous life at MPS Development in North Vancouver. We worked together and found ourselves of like mind on the importance of usability, design thinking, and the importance of aesthetics in software design.

When I decided to go solo, Sheila created the first visual treatment of the brand, along with a site design that conveyed the creative and more technical aspects of what I do. The focus at that time was requirements discovery and documentation, only to shift to a more full product and interaction design focus a couple years later.

Sheila’s was the only version of the site to feature the crow imagery. On knowing that Corvus is the family of crows, ravens and magpies, I’m usually asked ‘why that?’ The answer: I really like these birds. They’re clever, social, curious and can be a little loud; I share those qualities in different degrees, so I went with it. I got some feedback that crows do historically have a bad rap as symbols, so in the next version the crow image went away, but I stuck with the name. If you didn’t know it, crows are also a bit stubborn.

Version 2

I never met Damien Tanner in person but I got to know his work through his Ma.gnolia Blossom dashboard widget. Motivated to get on the content management bus, I chose Rails-based Typo and contracted Damien to set one up with a fresh look at the theme. He did so, and came up with something quite transformative. I don’t have a screenshot of the site as Damien did it, but his work was the basis of the theme I was using until today.

It was in this version I dispensed with a formal homepage in favour of brining visitors directly into the lifeblood of what I do: thinking about what makes great software. To stand in for the orienting value of a homepage, we brought in the Introduction Box, the yellow space at the top that can be closed from view for those who know me and what I do.

Version 3

A couple years later I asked Eric Grossnickle of Mighty Dream if he would do a little touch-up work on the theme. I knew Eric from advising on his social web app thesis project, and was impressed with his talent, now evidenced by his growing portfolio.

Eric freshened up Damien’s theme and added some convenience macros to Typo, but his most important contribution was off the website where he came up with a new business card. It was a radical departure in brand, but came at the right time as I was well into working with Ma.gnolia and had grown more interested in product design and strategy, as well as the social web.

Version 3

As the Typo project get more and more quiet, WordPress really took off, so I eventually asked Tzaddi Gordon of ThriveWire Media to migrate the site to WordPress and to re-create its look in a custom theme. She did so, adding some considerate additions like a dynamic 404 page to go with a well-coded theme and setup.  I’m really happy with WordPress, but couldn’t have made the move if I felt like I was giving up something in Typo. Tzaddi made sure that didn’t happen, and it’s been smooth sailing since. Except when I break it, which is when Tzaddi steps in again to fix my completely innocent missteps.

Version 4

Today I’m happy to unveil another big jump forward for the site, this time crafted by local designer and musician Frederick Brummer (aka Overmind Productions). I met Frederick through his day job at LiFT Studios when we worked on a project last year, and really liked his design style and insights.

Frederick did an extensive collaboration with me to figure out where to take the site, bringing a great deal to the new theme beyond pixels and code. He also put a lot of work into the site’s typography, something I had only given passing attention to in previous versions. The improvements that a change in typeface can bring are striking. Yes, I have seen Helvetica, but I can still be surprised by the impact of type.

The Twist

Here we are, then, up to date. I have a weird thing about my site: I only ask someone to work on it once. I’ve been very happy with and recommend everyone I mention here, but I love the idea of every revision being a totally new look at where I’m at. Doing this keeps me mindful that design isn’t just about making something, that its process often reveals what is otherwise unnoticed.

I don’t take this approach in my regular work, saving the eccentricity for my own properties rather than clients’. That makes it more fun, of course, and turns my own site into a project that pushes me into new areas in unexpected ways. I couldn’t do it any other way. Here’s to a great 2010.

When I say technology, I mean it in the sense I learned from reading essays on the subject by scientist, teacher and writer Dr. Ursula Franklin, where technology is not only the material tools that we use, but also the process by which we use them. Elections are about as close to an ultimate expression of that concept as I can imagine: democracy is realized through myriad tools and procedures, and exists only when it is practiced. The rules for handling and counting votes are as important as the ballots themselves, because neither the materials nor the process for operating them can produce the same results on their own.

Note that I’m not talking about the campaigns themselves, which are vastly more complicated than the casting and collecting of votes. While less complicated, election day is where the output of tabulated votes is transformed through observation and belief into an outcome of collective decision-making, spanning vast geography in a small timeframe, scaling up to a hundred million participants or more. And we thought web 2.0 was cool; the electoral mechanism itself is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

But there’s an ugly trend making its way into the technology of voting, one so familiar that we can feel powerless to change its course even though every early sign suggests that we should: polling stations are putting high-tech into the voting booth itself.

There’s enough suspense to go around for one day, so I’ll put my conclusion up front: the current and foreseeable generations of electronic voting machines have no place in democratic elections. None; nada; them and the horse they rode in on. For the rest of this post, I’ll explain how that conclusion came about.

What, Me Worry?

If you’re bracing for a rant on dishonest election officials and the ease of data manipulation that electronic voting can provide, I can’t deliver that. Though integrity and security in electronic voting machines is obviously very important and current, it’s a red herring that sidesteps the whole question of whether the machines should really be in use at all.

So let’s assume honesty in election officials for the sake of discussion. Take a few moments to watch this video showing the calibration process for a touch-screen voting machine that misbehaves across party lines:

Just put the key thing in and tap out a quaint sequence, and then it all works. It’s so simple, except that it’s heinously complicated. Not the actual calibration, but everything involved. The key used by the official is itself likely more complex than any voting machine preceding touch-screen technology. As such, the key, the touch-screen, the paper recording device, are all likely to be beyond the understanding and means to repair or to re-create by anyone present at the voting station. Put simply, the technology makes the material side the exclusive domain of electronics and software specialists.

Deep Disconnects

Rather than a person creating the mark on a ballot – the piece that is counted as a vote – , a voting machine sublimates the process of recording the mark on the ballot into the binary, scrambled and untouchable in the process of making the ballot. It’s like having to whisper your choice to someone else, who then goes around the corner and marks the ballot on your behalf. But that person moves very fast, and lives free of political bias, so it’s all cool?

In the video we see this machine making a printed record for visual verification at the point of voting. This feature is definitely reassuring, but initial counting still originates from a software record, making the paper trail the source of truth only when arbitrating a challenge to the results.

So there are really two serious disconnects in the overall usability of electronic voting machines: the first between non-specialist (polling volunteers and officials), and specialists (who design, assemble and service the machines), and the second between the voter and the actual recording of the vote. On the more practical side, they add expense and error-prone complexity to running elections, pushing up costs even though the trees get a break with less paper. Reliability, accountability and a good user experience are concerns closer to home.

The Long Game

I’ve recently been enjoying Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. The story features a culture of monastic academics, dedicated to preserving knowledge through millennia through traditions of thought and an ascetic lifestyle. While the world outside their walls seems contemporary and turbulent, their anachronistic lifestyle keeps them steady in their service of cultural knowledge. Good times.

Anathem, Stephenson has said, is inspired in large part by the Long Now Foundation and their signature project, the Millennium Clock. It sounds far-fetched, but the clock is built to run for 10,000 years. Given the changes in the last 200 years, we can barely speculate on the highs and lows that await humanity in the centuries to follow ours. Given this goal, the clock has one particularly eye-catching design requirement: it must be built so that it can be maintained and repaired with nothing more complicated than Bronze-Age technology. This affordance for radical, unforeseen circumstances makes the clock’s workings and the knowledge of timekeeping they embody accessible.

Back to elections. Almost. In the last few years I’ve seen the rare electronic till failure in restaurants, retail and grocery stores. Most times, there’s no manual backup in place. That is, there’s no stack of blank receipts for making transactions, no procedure to follow after turning it off and on, and then calling support. Or the manager, who will then call support after asking if they tried turning it off then back on. For a store it’s lost sales. Where electronic voting is in place, it can mean lost votes easily numbering more than would have broken ties in both the 2000 and 2004 elections. It’s worth asking if the moments of awkward register crashes at the store foreshadow a loss of knowledge about how to run an election without electronic voting, should electronic means become the norm from classroom to government for several generations.

The potential benefits of electronic voting are hard to resist: faster results would be hard to give up. I know, because I’m watching early results now and yes, fresher feels better. The prospects of securing votes from interference are fleeting when you start to consider the huge number of vulnerabilities that become possible with electronic voting machines.

The paper vote, for the things it can’t do, has benefits that I think outweigh those of speed and arguable security.

Like the clock built to be understood and maintained for 10,000 years, democracy should be practiced in a way that ensures its availability where electronic assistance isn’t possible. Future generations should be able to re-create the technology of a democratic election without more than a ballot, a way of marking it, and rules for casting and tabulating votes. By keeping the technology of voting simple, we also ensure that it remains accessible, reachable through materials on hand and without the need for specialized knowledge. Closer to home, we as voters know that people should never have to leave the poll at all uncertain that the interface recorded their intention honestly.

By doing so, we’ll be preserving one of society’s key mechanisms for consensus decision-making, and enjoying the certainly of knowing one’s vote has truly been cast.