In February 2004, as Heather and I were planning our wedding, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom decided that he could no longer tolerate the state’s disregard of its own constitution, which states that all citizens are equal under the law. On Valentine’s Day 2004, City Hall began issuing marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of gender.
Word spread fast and Heather and I went down to City Hall to see what was happening. What we saw was indescribable joy. Floodgates of love opening. Cheers from the growing crowd as each couple exited the building, finally legally equal.
We know what happened after that. The weddings were halted, Proposition 8 was put on the ballot (and paid for by mostly out-of-state religious zealots). And in perhaps the biggest moment of cognitive dissonance ever, on the night we elected Obama to be president, Californians amended their constitution with the words, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” A lawsuit ensued.
Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy – namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.
Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against gays and lesbians, including: gays and lesbians do not have intimate relationships similar to heterosexual couples; gays and lesbians are not as good as heterosexuals; and gay and lesbian relationships do not deserve the full recognition of society.
Many of the purported interests identified by proponents are nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples. Those interests that are legitimate are unrelated to the classification drawn by Proposition 8. The evidence shows that, by every available metric, opposite-sex couples are not better than their same-sex counterparts; instead, as partners, parents and citizens, opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples are equal.
The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed.
In much of the news coverage today, I’ve seen the phrase “Pro-Gay Marriage” used to describe the people who are celebrating Judge Walker’s ruling. But this rubs me the wrong way.
I’m not Pro-Gay Marriage, I’m Pro-Equality. I’m not Pro-Gay Rights, I’m Pro-Common Sense. I’m Anti-Discrimination. I’m Anti-Enshrining Your Queasiness About Buttsex In My Constitution. I’m Pro-When The Constitution Says We’re All Equal, It Means We’re All Equal.
I’m married, and it matters. It changes the way I look at the world, and the way the world looks at me. It comes with state and federal benefits and rights. Withholding those things from same-sex couples is discrimination, pure and simple. If you support withholding rights from people because of who they are, you’re a bigot. Period.
My grandmother taught me two important lessons. The first was tolerance. Enjoy people who are different from you. It’s the variety that makes life wonderful. The second was to always look out for the rights of others. Because if you sit by and let discrimination happen, you’ll be next.
My grandmother learned these lessons firsthand as a Jewish woman in Poland in the 1940s. In this country, we’re fortunate to have a mostly equitable, mostly tolerant place to live. But Proposition 8 is the clearest kind of discrimination – no different from the laws that kept my grandmother from going to school, or the anti-miscegenation laws from America’s past.
It is the duty of all people blessed with common sense, people who see in same-sex couples the same love they share with their partners, people who believe in equality and liberty, to stand up for our gay and lesbian friends and neighbors. We are Pro-Love. We are Pro-Equality. We will not tolerate discrimination. We will not shut up.
Because if you don’t stand up for other people’s rights, who will stand for yours?
I’ve been designing for websites for 15 years now, and designing for print for even longer. For the last few months, I led the design of MagCloud’s iPad app (now available in iTunes) with an incredibly talented group of people, and it was unlike any other experience I’ve had as a designer. Here are a few things I learned.
It’s intimate.
The iPad is an intimate experience for a user. The direct touch input removes a layer of abstraction, and that’s a really big deal. In this way, it was like going back to design for print – when you push it with your finger, it moves! – but it’s utterly unlike print in every other way imaginable. Point is, the direct interface really does mean reevaluating every assumption when it comes to interactive design.
All the terms changed.
I never realized how much web terminology had crept into my vocabulary. An iPad app doesn’t have pages, it has screens or views. You don’t click, you tap. You don’t scroll, you swipe. I spent much of our early meetings stumbling over my own words just to communicate the basics.
Goodbye, sweet hover.
I’ve always loved hover states. When a web page changes under your mouse pointer, it shows you that it’s paying attention to you. But remove the mouse and you remove the hover. Apple’s solution in Safari on iPad has been to make one tap show the hover, and another to commit the click. This is utterly confusing for every real user I’ve seen try it. So hover states are on the way out. I’ll miss them.
Hello, awesome gestures.
Gestures go beyond creating an intimate connection. They turn a computing device into an instrument. After all, you don’t use a guitar, you play it. And what’s playing a guitar besides learning a series of gestures?
Don’t believe me? Check out Uzu app. All it does is make pretty pictures, but with very complicated gestures, accommodating up to 10 fingers on the device at once!
Our humble MagCloud app doesn’t do anything this fancy, but I was able to make use of the pinch in/out gesture in a couple cool places in the reading experience (pinch in to see all pages, pinch out to zoom into a page). There’s much more work to be done here.
It takes time.
I drastically underestimated how much time it’d take to do the design phase of the app. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty quick with the web design, which made me overconfident. Apps have a lot of hidden corners that can disrupt a user experience. Getting them right takes time.
Design language still emerging.
We’ve had 15 years to figure out a visual language for the web, and it’s still evolving. The iPad has a few conventions, but they’ll look as silly in a year or two as the candy-colored iMacs look now. Personally, I love working in areas that still have a lot of undiscovered country, but it can be challenging, too. Sometimes, the only way to solve a new problem is with a new solution. That’s fun.
Apple’s App Store was a constant source of stress in the development process. Every time another story of Apple randomly booting an app from the store came out, the whole team quaked. The idea that we could do all this work and then Apple could deny the app, or even keep it in limbo forever, made us second- or third-guess every design decision. “Will this pixel hurt our chances of getting accepted?”
Apple is killing the creativity of their developers with the uncertainty of their App store policies. We made it through okay, thankfully, but I can only wonder about how much more interesting the store would be if Apple had given developers a clear list of rules, and promised to stick to it. The Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt people have about the App Store was entirely optional – Apple brought it on itself, and it’s not going away.
But all that aside, I have to say it’s thrilling to be doing design for a device that, even just a few years ago, would have been a crazy sci-fi pipe dream. There’s no question in my mind that iPads and the oncoming wave of similar devices are going to be around for a good long time. I can’t wait to see how they evolve.
So I have this nutty idea to make a site for people who like plants but aren't, well, hardcore botanists. As Flickr popularized photography and used photos as the framework of a social network, so could we popularize gardening and be connected to each other through our plants. If this sounds interesting to you, please fill out this form. We're gonna need plant people from experts to beginners, and some hardcore web tech jedi to put it all together. Who wants to try?
Say you’ve got a wall that gets nice light – the bright, indirect light that plants love – but you don’t want to hang a planter (hanging planters are still stuck in the ’70s design-wise) or slide over a bookcase just to set a pot down. What do you do? Enter the Woolly Pocket.
I’d seen Woolly Pockets in action at Flora Grubb. They have an immense vertical garden that’s full of all my favorite tropical plants. But it’s gigantic. Somehow it never occurred to me you could use just one until my visit this weekend, when I remembered this spot in my living room that gets nice indirect light but has no place for plants. So I got one!
Installing it was a breeze – just two screws with drywall mounts. Then I just shoveled in some dirt and added a few plants. In this case, I put in a small Elephant Ear (Colocasia Esculenta Elepaio), a small African Mask, and a couple different Pothos Ivys (one’s a clipping from another plant in the house). The idea is, the Elephant Ear and the African Mask will grow up, and the Pothos will grow down, filling out the wall.
The Woolly Pocket’s made of recycled plastic bottles and has a rubber lining so hopefully it won’t leak. I can’t wait to see how it breaks in. If this one works out, I’ve got big plans for the kitchen.
If you want one of your own, I’ll include a link to their site in a sec. First I wanted to warn you that their site is heavy on the Flash and they made this extremely stupid series of videos that tend to pop up annoyingly. But the product is great. Link! (And no, I get no kickbacks for this – I’m just excited about it.)
A customer complaint dialogue is structured around a two-position toggle: a) it’s terrible, b) it’s nothing. The first one to grab a position forces the other person to assume the only one left. When Dear Customer calls, “Canon Law” dictates the first words out of my mouth: ‘This is terrible, how could we have let this happen to you!’. This forces the caller to concede: ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, I just would like to…’ A cooperative conversation ensues.
However, if I argue that it isn’t the end of civilization, civility goes out the window. Dear Customer feels disrespected and insists things are awful. It’ll take time to lower the temperature and hear one another.
This is total customer service kung-fu. I’ve done it, and it works. Sometime all a complainer needs to hear is that you understand, and empathize with, their complaint. You can never convince them that their complaint isn’t important, and trying will only amplify the problem.
"So if plants aren't using electrical signals in nervous systems like animals, what do they do with the electrical impulses they produce? In most cases, plant biologists don't know."
Yochai Benkler, when asked the usual asinine internet-as-echo-chamber question by Brooke Gladstone on this week’s On the Media, said this:
What are we lamenting? We’re lamenting the decline of a shared culture that’s relatively dominated by a small number of people who can decide what everyone needs to know? That’s not obviously a state that we have to yearn for. On the other hand, the fact that we have facilities for people who do want to be engaged to become much better informed if it is easy … from the perspective of a democratic society, this new state seems to me to be, not utopia, but more attractive.
My translation: You know who’s sad about the gatekeepers losing control of the media? Nobody except the gatekeepers. If you care about democracy, thank your lucky stars for the internet, the most open forum for the free exchange of ideas ever invented.
I say: Let’s dance on the graves of the gatekeepers. Let’s build things never before possible. Let’s show what a giant network of brains can really do.
Say you’ve got a wall that gets nice light – the bright, indirect light that plants love – but you don’t want to hang a planter (hanging planters are still stuck in the ’70s design-wise) or slide over a bookcase just to set a pot down. What do you do? Enter the Woolly Pocket.