Negative Space
Chapter 10: How to battle invisibility blindness
Dear Friends,
Negative space. This week I’m thinking about the things that are right in front of you that you can’t see. A guy in my office recently went for a run in Rocky Mountain National Park and never came home. He could have been me. Only in hindsight can I see what should have been obvious. I missed an opportunity to make a friend. The negative space of this email project is that it is one way. I rarely know what happens on the receiving side of my letters. If you think of it, send me a note. Old friends and new, I love to hear about you.
This chapter marks the halfway point of User Zero. What do you think so far? Attentive readers will notice that I am out of order. I apologize for skipping chapter 10, but I will get back in order next week with chapter 13. Stay creative.
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade
“Everything you've learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.” —Buckminster Fuller
When I was a boy, I spent many muggy Missouri days studying my favorite artist, M.C. Escher. I was captivated by how Escher could break your brain by bending the positive and negative space of his art. Echoes of these brain-twisting lessons still reverberate in my skull. It has made me a skeptical adult, permanently questioning visual information, constantly on the lookout for fraudsters who manipulate our perceptions to serve selfish needs.
My favorite Escher print is Ascending and Descending depicting a building that exists in a vast empty landscape. At the top of the structure is a staircase that defies rationality because it is a loop that never ends. Hooded people walk the stairs, some climbing to new heights without ever gaining elevation, while others descend lower and lower constantly passing the same people with upward trajectories.
It's hard not to feel like the lost beings in an Escher print. We are religionless monks descending endless staircases. We sit in empty rooms, complete meaningless tasks, and fill our bellies with tasteless food. Gravity shifts, stairs flip, and it is hard to know if we are going up or down. Faceless people pass us, incapable of eye contact, destined to remain strangers. How can you not feel lost in this uncanny valley? It appears to be three-dimensional and yet something is missing. There feels like there should be words to describe this sensation, but you can’t quite find them.
In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells a story about turkeys. Every day the farmer feeds the turkeys and tends to their health and well being. Life is good, the farmer is seen as a friend and benevolent provider. Then on Thanksgiving the farmer arrives with a knife and what seemed permanent comes to a swift end. The turkey believed it understood the world right until the last moment. Know-it-all errors have deadly consequences.
When black swan events happen to people fooled by the permanence illusion they feel like the world is falling down around them. User zero understands that change is inevitable and plans accordingly. They are unsurprised when the illusion collapses, in fact they might be the person who instigated the revolution in the first place, triggering a chain of events that ended in their favor.
One of the most important lessons in visual design is the importance of negative space. For every mark you make you are changing the space around it. Artists understand that this negative space is just as important as the mark itself. We tend to focus on the marks never realizing that the canvas is infinite.
Visually this is a critical lesson, but it is equally important as a way to evaluate other aspects of life. When you are listening to someone speak it is also important to hear what they aren't saying. To appreciate the weather in Colorado you need to acknowledge the absence of Missouri's weather. For every headline begging for your attention there is an untold story few can hear. Like Sherlock Holmes solving the mystery of Silver Blaze, it takes a leap of imagination to recognize the significance of the dog that doesn’t bark.
With practice you recognize the negative space everywhere. For example, our family tradition is to watch a movie on Friday nights. My youngest son’s tradition is to watch the first 15 minutes of the movie then he falls asleep. After the movie I carry his limp body upstairs to his bedroom. This used to be a chore until I had a revelation. As my back strained to lift him off the couch, I thought of his brothers who are much too big for me to carry. In that instant I wondered if this might be the last time I complete this fatherly task. Suddenly a routine chore was filled with deep meaning. I saw the negative space.
If you see the world as a closed system where all the answers are known (or are knowable via your phone) you are only seeing a fraction of what is possible. You are blinded by the positive space, ignorant of the existence of unlimited unknowns hiding in the negative space. We lack the skills that would allow us to recognize the skills we lack. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where less competent people overestimate their skills and underestimate the contributions of others. Incompetence robs us of our ability to see how inept we are. We are all susceptible to this bias. As we get better and better at something, the harder it is to resist the temptation to believe our knowledge is complete. The know-it-all sees no evidence to disprove his mastery. Know-it-all syndrome isn’t a particularly new personality disorder. Plato wrote:
“And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.” —Thamus (from Plato’s Phaedrus)
Our political system denies negative space. To be an independent thinker in a landscape dominated by partisans will almost certainly cause your voice to be shouted down from both directions. Rather than volunteer for this abuse, most independent thinkers keep their non-conforming ideas to themselves. Remaining silent, the ideas with the most potential to disrupt the Republican/Democrat monopoly are lost in the negative space.
In education, the negative space is hard to see because it feels like the process is purely additive. Schools seem primarily interested in cramming the kids' brains with definitions, facts, memorizable shortcuts, and stats that are easily tested. What isn’t detected are the subjects that aren’t included in the curriculum. The negative space of education is only occasionally breached by the rare teacher who touches the lives of her students. Some of us can point to these rare exceptions, we remember a teacher who encouraged our questions, fueled our uncertainty, and pointed us at unknown worlds where our curiosity found open space where our imagination could thrive. We were drawn to the negative space.
We deify experts, trusting them implicitly to guide us. Because we trust them with our lives, we’d prefer to believe that they actually do know-it-all. Confidence is rewarded and know-it-alls tend to rise to the top of their fields. The knowledge of experts seems so final that it is hard to believe that there can be deep untapped veins of knowledge waiting to be discovered. We accept the certainty of scientists, doctors, and politicians as proof that everything is under control. But you can’t solve new problems with blind force and reliance on pre-existing patterns. We need people who aren’t afraid to see things differently. The most essential thing in every area of expertise is creativity.
Most jobs don’t reward creativity. In fact, creativity is a liability in most fields. Anyone who brings creativity to their job – whether it is as a nurse, an engineer, a salesman, a teacher, or a designer – puts their career at risk because it blurs the boundaries of their job title. That’s dangerous. So rather than expose the negative space, most occupations maintain the illusion that everything is under control. Businesses require process, they are well-lubricated systems that flush out the unexpected in favor of safe, recreateable, predictable humans. Even Apple, a company where thinking differently is supposedly honored, can do little more than tip a hat in the direction of elusive free thinkers.
“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Strip away the fluff from Apple’s advertising masterpiece and you get:
"Here’s to the ones who see things differently. You can’t ignore them because they try to change things."
Perhaps that is the most we can strive for, the ability to change things. But how? How do you think different? How do you train yourself to see the negative space hiding right in front of your eyes? Is it possible to switch allegiance from a slow death in defense of everything you are certain about to a long wandering life investigating the unknown?
The know-it-all encounters non-stop new information and yet remains eternally unsurprised. He is somehow never wrong and yet in a perpetual state of justifying his mistakes. He is somehow rarely accurate without ever blaming himself as the source of the inaccuracies. He will forever be supplementing his errors in judgements with amendments, exceptions, and disclaimers. Rather than a thrill, new knowledge is embarrassing, a flaw in his personality that must be hidden, denied, never spoken of again. Everything he learns is an appendix to a distant education. What little new insight is gained is but a footnote to his diploma, the dusty document of knowledge canonized long ago when his education was completed. New input must be normalized, stripped of its novelty, indexed in support of institutional knowledge because contradiction is a threat to the monument of his being, tiny fractures threatening to shatter his ego. To him, knowledge yet unlearned is static, a set of information that he will transcribe should additional data become required. Data gathering, which is what education has become for him, is a tedious but necessary routine of memorization that rewards him with the ability to deflate the ambitions of know-lessers. Everything has been done before, the only joy art brings him is the pleasure of decapitation, the process of spotting references to what has already been done and pointing out unoriginality in anything new. He funnels credit from the living to the dead because historic achievements are less threatening than modern rivals.
We can avoid the Dunning-Kruger effect, we can escape the know-it-all syndrome through creativity, by stepping into the negative space. The creative person is aware of how little she knows. She draws life from this debt because long ago she disconnected her ego from her knowledge. To contain her world in a few memorizable formulas would be death, a guarantee that growth is no longer possible. Instead, her perception is a sketch, an impression where every line can be erased or darkened. Her journal fills as she captures every nuance, savoring every opportunity to unlearn the encyclopedia of her formal education. She is never threatened by new data, additional information simply adds to the mystery that fuels her inspiration. There is never contradiction, only new layers of beauty, proof of the divine, more reasons to keep drawing. Every moment changes her reality because the more she looks the more she sees.
Obstacles aren’t permanent, there is negative space everywhere. Secret doors, escape hatches, windows everywhere open and ready for you to pass through. As you realize this, you step out of the Escher drawing and see the illusion. After spending your life climbing a staircase in search of answers you realize you have been going in circles. Awake to this fact, now with each loop you gain a little clarity, you are no longer fooled by the illusion. You step into its negative space and all of a sudden what you thought was permanent becomes flexible. When you internalize this idea, a new source of creativity is available. Because things are no longer permanent, the possibility of change is always at your fingertips. You can make it happen.
Beware, however, there is also danger lurking in the negative space. Just because the turkey gains the ability to see the real intentions of its butcher benefactor, that doesn’t make his situation any less deadly. Awareness of the negative space, acknowledgement that there is no limit to what you don’t know, is the first step to uncovering the dangers lurking in objects that once felt familiar and safe. In the next chapter we will explore one of the most common user interfaces in the world and discover how tampering with its design has lead to death.