Rule 1: When you mean it is or it has, use an apostrophe
Examples:
It’s a beautiful day.
It’s got to get warmer outside.
It’s so nice to meet you.
Rule 2: When you are using its as a possessive, don’t use the apostrophe.
Examples:
The dog is eating its bone.
The jewelry store celebrated its ninth anniversary.
Note: Apparently the possessive was also written it’s until modern times, quite possibly dropping the apostrophe in order to parallel possessive personal pronouns like hers, theirs, yours, ours, etc.”
Use “their” to indicate possession. It is a possessive adjective and indicates that a particular noun belongs to them.
My friends have lost their tickets.
Their things were thrown around the apartment.
There
Use there when referring to a location or place, whether concrete (“over there by the building”) or more abstract (“it must be difficult to live there”).
Also use there with the verb BE (is, am, are, was, were) to indicate the existence of something, or to mention something for the first time.
There is an antique store on Madison Avenue.
There are many documents that are used in investigations.
They’re
Remember that they’re is a contraction ofthey and are. It can never be used as a modifier, only as a subject (who or what does the action) and verb (the action itself).
They’re always late to meetings.
They’re going to Dishes for lunch.
They’re going to the baseball game over there to celebrate their birthdays…. Whew
Lastly, the best way to remember these things is to do some swapping.
If you wrote there, will the sentence still make sense if you replace it with here? If so, you’re using it correctly.
If you chose their, will the sentence still make sense if you replace it with our? If so, you’ve chosen the correct word.
If you used they’re, will the sentence still make sense if you replace it with they are? If so, correctomundo
Martin Clutterbuck, Manager of Fabrication & Modularization at Devon Energy Canada has a unique perspective as an Oil & Gas Industry Owner. It enables him and his team to have a birds-eye view of the entire modular construction process from feasibility through to operations. In this interview, he discusses the benefits and inhibitors to this ability, and more.
In what ways do you believe your perspective as an Owner enables you to have a birds-eye view of the entire modular construction process from feasibility through to operations? What are the benefits and inhibitors of this ability?
You’re correct that we do have that bird’s eye view as owners, so we get the whole picture. We get to see from early development into what sort of projects we’re looking at and then we can develop and see what the modularization and fabrication plan is for the project. We do that early so we’re there prior to us really getting into the engineering stage and that discussion happens as a group within our organization a lot earlier than would normally happen if we came in later during an engineering phase.
Where, in your opinion, do organizations fall short with their modular and prefabrication implementation plan? Which factors are often overlooked and therefore inhibit success?
I think part of that is we have the opportunity to have some input and support the design and we can really get what we want. We can really focus on the requirements of our modularization plan. We typically know the list of fabricators we want to go to. We have the opportunity to really support the construction execution plan build. We understand what the start up and the commission criteria is and obviously, ultimately it’s operations and their need to maintain an operating facility.
One of the things where some people may fall short is the discipline to wait long enough for the design. Modularization projects tend to take more work and effort upfront and you have to have the discipline to wait until you have all the information, and the correct information, to go into fabrication and modularization. What you can’t do is continually change your mind and I know as owners sometimes we have that thing where we change our minds but we need to make sure we have that level of detail and information we need to have before getting into fabrication.
How do you determine which prefabricated modules are best suited for your construction plan?
I think ultimately you have to have a philosophy within your organization of what you want to modularize. You have to make a decision early and upfront of what that is, so you should have an idea of what your modularization goals are. For example, you may want to look at what percentage of the plant you want modularized or what can be modularized within the facility. You want to look at where the facility is located, what resources are available to you to build it and, lastly, whether you need to build it offshore or locally or wherever possible reducing your risks out in the field.
Collaboration is the key to safety says Christopher Hart, Acting Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board appointed by President Obama.
In this exclusive interview, Hart insists alternate modes of transportation needs to take a page out of the book of the aviation industry, which managed to increase productivity while maintaining a high safety rate.
The Honorable Christopher Hart is the Acting Chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
CH: I’ve been in transportation and safety issues for quite a few years. I first started at the NTSB in 1990 when I was appointed by President George H. Bush to be a member of the board. I did that from 1990-1993 and then returned in 2009 when I was appointed Vice Chairman by President Obama. So, I’ve been in transportation safety for a long time. I thoroughly enjoy it and it’s very gratifying to see an enormous number of safety improvements because of the NTSB.
HH: What collaborative transportation safety and productivity lessons can the oil and gas industry learn from the commercial aviation industry, which underwent an industry-side, collaborative process to identify, prioritize and address potential safety issues?
Well the aviation industry has done something I have not seen at such a level before or since. It was in the mid-90s when they were concerned that their accident rate, which had been coming down for a number of years, had become stuck at a plateau. They were concerned about that because they knew that the volume was going to increase and, unfortunately, what the public sees is not the rate of the accidents, but the number, or the volume, of accidents they see. So, when the aviation industry looked at the volume rate they were very concerned and that’s when they decided to do something that was out of the box. The out of the box thing they did was to collaborate. It’s been an enormous success story in a lot of ways. In only 10 years they went from this stuck, flat accident rate to reducing that rate by more than 80 percent. In so doing, they also improved their productivity, which flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Usually, when you improve productivity you hurt safety and vice versa. They did it without the process creating any new regulations and they also did it in a way of collaboration that resulted in minimal unexpected consequences. That’s always the big problem in any complex system; when you make changes in one part of a complex system you often get unintended consequences.
Since safety is front of mind for both industries, will you explain how collaboration from key participants in the industry – the manufacturers, employees, vendors and regulators – led to a safer transportation and logistics operation without sacrificing performance and productivity?
Not only did it not sacrifice it, it improved it. My theory on that is, unlike the usual process of improving safety in a regulated industry, which is where the regulator says, “I see a problem and here’s the solution. Here’s the solution that you guys need to implement,” this is a very different process because by collaborating all of the members who have a stake in the fight – all of the ones who have a dog in the fight – are present at the table. So, in the case of aviation it was the manufacturers and the airlines and the pilots and the air traffic controllers and the regulator all have a seat at the table. All those players at the table, while they’re there to talk about safety, they’re thinking about their own productivity. So, what that means is that in the real world they’re not going to put an idea on the table if it’s going to hurt their own productivity.
Would you share some tips for managing the expectations of key stakeholders? Those who have a vested interest in streamlining transportation and logistics issues may have different interests than those executing the plan. How do you ensure everyone who is involved in the problem is also involved in the solution?
The way to get collaboration started is difficult to be sure and I think that’s one of the reasons why I haven’t seen it more. When people see that it’s beneficial to everyone at the table it’s a huge win-win for everybody that participates the snowball starts rolling and it builds up momentum. So, once the process is started, once you have some progressive leadership, that’s when the players fall in line because they too can benefit from this collaborative process.
Will you briefly touch on the transferability across modes? You were mentioning mobile and automation …
The NTSB is looking at all the modes of transportation and we’re finding that a lot of issues that we see in one mode are actually common in other modes. Take, for example, fatigue. Most commercial transportation is 24/7 and humans are not, which means we see fatigue in all commercial transportation. There are lots of lessons to be learned from one mode that’s transferable to another mode. We’re seeing unfortunate use of personal electronic devices in all the modes and one of the lessons learned regarding portable electronics devices is very transferable.
What does the future of transportation security and safety look like to you?
I’m very optimistic about the future because of the collaborative process. Collaboration has a huge opportunity to promote productivity and safety – not only in transportation, but in a lot of industries. There’s enormous applicability of this very powerful tool across the modes.
First engage adult students; then you’ll keep them.
We’re all busy. In addition to work and family responsibilities, adult students must also carve out time for their courses from their hectic schedules. But, some students don’t have the discipline or loyalty to do so.
In this interview, Amy Stevens, Associate Vice President, eLearning at Southern New Hampshire University, shares how she keeps the university’s adult students engaged and active even when they’re faced with other distractions.
What are the biggest extrinsic and intrinsic barriers to retaining adult students who may have full-time jobs and other obligations that make it difficult to stick to their online learning courses? How can these barriers be abated?
One of the greatest things about higher education today is the diversity of our student body, while there is no one set of demographics that describe them; there are some commonalities we see among our students. Online Masters Students are, for the most part, career driven, focused and able to leverage the success they had in completing their undergraduate experience and apply some of those lessons learned to success at the graduate level. Students who are career changers and who may be transitioning into growth fields like Health Professions and STEM face additional challenges because they most likely didn’t have any of the more demanding science or math experience that would make them fully prepared for the rigors of the field. We know these students will be more successful, for example, if we can get them into foundations courses that will help them meet the competencies demanded for the core courses in their new programs. However, those courses add to the overall time and cost.
Again, there is tremendous diversity among undergraduate students, many of whom had really negative educational experiences along the way. Being really clear in the admissions process, understanding the student’s goals and then constantly making that alignment clear to the students can prevent/situate some of the challenges that students are likely to encounter. The other challenge is that those negative educational experiences have a tendency to make students resistant to taking risks in the classroom. It is essential to create an environment where they feel safe to make some mistakes, and not do so in front of their classmates.
How do you engage a typically diverse and sometimes disloyal online student body?
First and foremost, the educational experience must feel relevant to them and align with their goals. If a student feels like the work they are being asked to do doesn’t have real world applications, or won’t help them get ahead, they will not benefit from the experience. So even when we are dealing with things like General Education requirements, we really try to make sure our students understand that while this may not have immediate ties to their chosen profession, employers tell us that they want graduates who are critical thinkers, great communicators and confident problem solvers and these courses are a way to gain those competencies. It also helps if the student feels you are invested in their success and that is a message that can’t just be delivered from their faculty members, but needs to be consistent across their entire experience.
What can faculty do to create a culture of engagement with their distance learning students?
Engagement is essential; students need to feel part of the process. For example, they really appreciate high levels of individualized feedback, and they appreciate when faculty bring their real world experiences into the course to illustrate concepts and bring theory to life.
Christie is the Founder & CEO of UChic. She’s also a Millennial, the market her company targets.
UChic is a mission-driven lifestyle brand whose products sales empower our teen girl consumers through scholarships. Our research found that 95% of young women in the U.S. lack the funding to pursue their dreams outside of the classroom. Knowing that these extracurricular experiences can change lives, we launched our company and foundation in 2013, and are getting set to launch our first product — the “Gracie,” a fashionable computer case for the classroom and beyond. The case, available right now through Indiegogo, will help fund the dreams of over 10 deserving young women with $1000 scholarships, kicking off the company’s on-going commitment to funding the dreams of young women through our product sales.
I was inspired to start UChic based on the success we’ve had in creating the best-selling guidebook to college written “for and by” young women — U Chic: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything (Sourcebooks 2013). Over 100,000 book copies have been sold since, and a fourth edition is in the works. Call me a Millennial, but I wanted to do more to empower our consumers.
What are the benefits of the Millennial consumer market when considering a new product launch? How does their involvement with brands influence their peers’ power to purchase as well as to the co-creation of products?
As a Millennial, I know first-hand how much our generation desires to have a “voice” in the world (that’s partly why I created UChic — to give my generation and younger a platform) and thanks to the technological advances we’ve seen happen over the past decade, we have more power than generations that came before us. From presidential campaigns to regime changes in the Middle East to new product design, Millennials are changing the course of “business as usual.”
From the research, we know that compared to older generations, Millennials have 200 more friends on Facebook and are more likely to use social media to express their feelings and opinions, which makes them more influential in their ability to spread the word farther and faster. As consumers, Millennials’ purchasing decisions are also more likely to be influenced by what their peers have to say, so it is critical for companies to figure out how to be a part of these conversations. One way to do it is to ask Millennials to help “co-create” the products they want.
What are the disadvantages of managing the expectations of Millennials when it comes to product development?
The desire for instant gratification in the digital age can make the millennial consumers’ expectation quite high when it comes to product development. If something goes wrong — and yes, even Facebook can get it wrong at times — Millennials are more likely to share their angst on social media. And because of their larger and stronger social networks, such despair can travel far and wide, becoming viral within a few hours of the first unhappy Tweet. Companies can manage these higher expectations by being transparent from the start on the product development process.
What are some of the latest tools and techniques for conducting cost-effective market research with Millennials?
Online surveys and community engagement strategies (i.e., posting questions on FB or Twitter) are some the best and most cost-effective tools around when it comes to conducting market research with Millennial consumers. From my research, Millennials like to weigh-in on the market research process; it gets back to that desire to have a voice or say in the world.
Whether it’s simply positioned as an “exclusive opportunity” to take part in a new product launch or tied to an incentive like a gift card, Millennials are open to being engaged in this manner. And better yet, figure out a way to follow up with them once the product has launched for additional feedback. Couched within a question of “Did we get it right?” should open the door for additional engagement and feedback that can be good for the bottom line.
New Yorkers: It’s time to slow down and think about what we’re putting in our mouths.
Why? September is Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. There’s no need to list the statistics on what we all already know – more American children are obese now than ever before. But, legislative bans on sugar and sodium are not the solution, education is.
Good eating habits start at home. This concept can be hard to fully grasp for some, including me. I was raised in the South where a typical meal consisted of hearty servings of meat and starches. Our family’s pantry was never devoid of cookies, crème pies, sugary cereals and potato chips. I will never forget my first sip of Cream Soda. It could have been relabeled Crack Soda – I just could not get enough.
I don’t believe any of us quite understood the extent to which our family’s poor eating habits were contributing to our poor quality of life. As a child and into my teen years I was often lethargic, cranky and unproductive. I now wonder where I would be if only I had learned how to make healthier choices earlier in life.
I don’t blame my parents who were simply carrying on a culture of eating that was prevalent in the 1980s. Everything from our culture, religion and income influences how we eat. But although New Yorkers in general tend to be pretty health conscientious and information on eating healthily and exercising regularly is prevalent, our children’s waistlines continue to expand.
JAMA Pediatrics’ list of adverse effects brought on by obesity in children is long: early on-set puberty, greater risk of behavioral and psychological problems, depression, anxiety and eating disorders, among other ailments.
It hasn’t been easy for me to write a new normal of healthy eating and regular exercise, but I do it to be healthy, more alert and perform better at my job. My hope is for kids today to be educated before they develop bad habits that will one day need to be reversed.
Halloween is just around the corner followed by a months-long, treat-filled holiday season. Start by setting guidelines for your family’s choices rather than dictating what they can and cannot eat. Include your kids in your grocery shopping so they can take pride in their food choices. Slowly introduce fruits and vegetables into their snack circuit. Encourage slow eating so they really enjoy their meal for all its textures and flavors. Lastly, sit down together for dinner. That’s when rather than focusing on the food the focus will be on family.
Ever wonder whyou like to visit some websites over another? How some have features that are more intuitive or enjoyable to read? This isn’t the result of a guessing game, it’s the hard work of people like Billy Carlson, the Director of User Experience at Threadless.com.
What is Threadless?
Threadless is an online retailer. We sell mostly t-shirts, but other products like iPhone cases, wall art. But our unique business model is that we are crowd sourced design. So, anyone in the world can submit their design to our website, and then our community of over three million users will go on the site and vote for their favorite design with a score between 1-5. Each week, there’s a new set of submissions up for seven days, and then at the end of each cycle, the top vote-getting design gets printed and sold on our website.
You’re being watched. Billy analyzes user experience on Threadless.com, to make your experience more seamless.
We are very community-focused, and we’re focused on not only our customers, but our artist base. And we’re very unique in the way that we try to do as much as we can to promote our artists and find the best way for them to monetize their artwork. For example, we currently have a whole line of greeting cards at Target. So we’re trying to branch away from not only Threadless.com, but trying to find great outlets for independent artists to monetize their artwork.
As we all know, a website is really the digital storefront for an organization in the e-commerce industry. Therefore, ease of use, the customer experience, and usability have to be really on point. What are your tips for improving these features to increase the pleasure experienced by your customers, so that they keep coming back and will be loyal and satisfied with their experience?
We’re very lucky, because we have a very vocal fan base of customers and artists. We hear a lot of feedback from them through our social media channels and they also email us. We have a huge forum on our website that gets so much use; there are so many users on there discussing what we do.
But on top of that, we also like to do usability tests; A/B tests for ideas. For example, we redesigned our homepage because we found that we had a promotional slider at the front and center, like many sites do, but users were not waiting to see the other slides, so it was sort of a waste. It was also very engineering-heavy. So we had the idea of the slider, we were taking a lot of time to support it with graphics and more and then when we redesigned it, we listened to our analytics from Google and also what our customers were telling us and we totally redesigned the homepage to be more effective. There are a lot of different areas that explain different parts of the website so it’s not just commerce-focused, it tells the customer about the artist and it gives the artist a chance to shine and hopefully to give them a little more promotion.
We try to listen and then learn. I think it’s pretty simple, but I think it’s also important to never stop iterating on a design. You should work on a design, analyze it, keep tweaking it and don’t stop. Don’t feel like it’s ever finished, I guess.
That leads me into my follow-up question, which is: how do you know when it’s time to update your user interface? And with these updates or these changes, and you mentioned that it was kind of engineering-heavy, how do you not throw off the functionality or what people are used to?
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think we’re always involved in a part of our site. And so, we worked heavily on the homepage for a while at the beginning of this year, and we’ve moved to other parts. And what we like to do is kind of cycle through.
So for instance, we spend a lot of time focusing on a section of the site and will continually do so. We will cycle through the entire site once annually to do major overhauls, but not every eighteen months. It’s typically, again, not only is it us determining if we would like to redesign something, maybe we don’t like the interface anymore. But we’ll listen to our customers and watch what their behavior is, and see if a design is the solution to fixing a usability. Sometimes it’s text-based, Using the proper words can really help change how a page is viewed by a user. A good example of that is that we redesigned our main navigation and titles of our sections our website in the fall of 2012. It was really marketing-heavy and called “make, pick, play, and shop.” But we found that a lot of our users didn’t really understand the difference between picking and shopping. The lesson learned was that sometimes, using clear, actionable copy is the best way to go. Sometimes you want to be a little fun, and sometimes you just need to get right to the point.
How important is the design of the interface to sales?
I think it’s very important to design a layout that properly guides the user into what; the purpose of a page is to learn about a product, and then hopefully select your sizes and options and buy it. You don’t want to bury anything. You want to make sure that you first think of the user’s experience, and then you try to layer on all the design layouts to match that.
I think it’s really important nowadays to be conscious of the different types of devices that people use to access your site and the different screen sizes. So you know, we’ve been moving slowly towards a responsive or adaptive website that, any type of device could view our website much easier than they could even like a year ago. But I think design, not only visual design, but the user experience design, is extremely important to making a great interface. It really helps guide your customers and your users to like, you know, what to do.
And we’re still always tweaking. Our product pages aren’t perfect yet. There’s still more we’d like to do. We’re getting there soon. But again, I think it’s always, think of your customers first. Think of making the actions that need to be put on the page very simple and clear. And then continue to iterate on that.
So I just want to switch gears a little bit, because this is what you’ll also be addressing at the conference, is the differences between marketing research and usability testing. So, could tell us maybe the benefits of usability testing if it’s executed correctly? And maybe explain what the correct way of implementing it?
Sure, we definitely like to test our new features to make sure that any assumptions are correct. So we’ll design an interface or a user experience in a certain way, and we’ll probably A/B test that with the current version to make sure that there is improvement in our users’ thought process while they’re using our product.
We are planning on redesigning our product page and we’ve made some assumptions and changed a lot of things. Our plan is to test each of these pages and make sure that we didn’t change something fundamentally that would confuse our users to buy it. I think it’s really important and it’s really easy nowadays to do usability testing. So I really don’t think there’s an excuse to not.
Could you give us an example of how leveraging insights from consumer behavior on Threadless and/or your mobile app could inform new features or streamline your existing features?
Yeah, that’s a great question! It happens a lot here at Threadless, because we really listen to what people tell us. So, one of the things that I mentioned earlier is that we used to have a promotional marketing slider on the homepage, but we noticed that it wasn’t getting a lot of clicks or attention.
We listened to our analytics and a lot of people told us that they don’t ever even notice it. So we actually redesigned the homepage based on this feedback, took those slides out and made more of a promotional area that was longer and with more content. That definitely increased visibility into what we were doing. We were able to tell a better story of that week’s artist, because we didn’t have one area moving and then everything else below it that not even being noticed.
We really want to focus on our artists. So making this change allowed us to do that. It allows us to spotlight our favorite design of the week, the artist who designed it, and where they’re from.
Again, I want to talk about the navigation. We found from research that the navigation was confusing, so we reverted back to the previous language. At Threadless I am also the Mobile Product Owner. We do a lot of testing and listen to a lot of consumer insights for mobile apps. So, it’s the same thing. We’re currently developing a new navigation system in our mobile app because we’ve heard from a lot of people and in analytics that they just don’t use this feature we built. So we’re going to come up with a new version that we feel is better.
And I think that’s just kind of how it goes. You have to listen to everyone’s opinions and then sort of step back from what you made and really think about it. A lot of the time we get great insights and we’re able to act on them quickly, so it’s nice.
Is your organization struggling with strategic measurement? You may be tracking the wrong things.
Chris Abel is a simple man. So, he isn’t quite sure why call centers continue to struggle with measurement. Call Centers excel at measuring everything an agent does, he says, but not necessarily how what they do better serves the customer.
I sat down with Chris, who is Director of Contact Center Operations at Bright Horizons to get see what he would answer the question; ”How do you become the most high-performing call center possible?”
Chis Abel of Bright Horizons
Chris Abel: For starters, leadership needs to move beyond KPIs and SLAs. The goal instead should be to predict customer’s future behavior since they will dictate how centers will operate. For instance, internally the bulk of conversation around customer experience centers on handle time and talk time. That’s not the case at Bright Horizons.
“The talk time is the talk time,” Chris says. “What we manage to is what we do during the call and after the call that actually impacts our overall business.”
The most valuable indicators to measure progress within the call center – beyond performance – is customer experience. Bright Horizons measures their customer experience through CSAT Scores and Net Promoter Scores. Fortunately, their CSATs are relatively high at 96 percent and their Net Promoter range between 67-78 percent. So the challenge then becomes how do you move the needle? What should the focus be to really impact experience?
Chris has an internal quality team that measures whether or not the agents are providing complete and accurate information. One of the things that they are implementing in regards to quality is defining the customer’s experience. Questions that need to be answered include, “Did we answer all of their questions? Did we help educate them on any future needs that could actually be addressed today so they don’t have to call back tomorrow?”
Looking forward, measurement may not change very much or at all, but Chris thinks that whatever the future of measurement is, it will be dictated by the customers.
“What’s important to them should be what’s important to us,” he says.
I can’t live like I’m invincible and continue to eat, drink and party with no thought of responsibility or accountability. I should probably calm down my YOLO lifestyle. It’s true I will only live once, especially in New York City, but instead of adopting this mantra as permission to make poor decisions, I’ll need to use it as a reminder to watch my back.
Literally, I need to watch my back.
A four-inch scar now marks the spot on my right shoulder where my skin cancer once lived. Like a cow that’s been branded, I too was cauterized and sewn up following Mohs surgery to remove the Basal Cell Carcinoma. I am in no danger of dying and I never was.
Under the umbrella and a sweater — you can never be too covered.
Recovery has been painful, but not debilitating. For the first week, I felt the sore when I walked, when I washed my hair and when I cut vegetables. It was a constant reminder – so much so that I eventually started hugging my arm to my torso to minimize the swinging and swaying.
This pause on my active lifestyle has me thinking about what happens next. The worst part of my cancer diagnosis, surgery and recovery so far has been that I haven’t been able to do yoga. Woe is me. But while I feel unworthy of sympathy, I also feel scared as hell.
Two days before my surgery, I learned a girl from my high school had died of cancer. I found out later it the cancer was melanoma, which is the most aggressive form of skin cancer. She was 29 – my age.
When I first visited my dermatologist he was more concerned with a dark mole on my lower back than he was about the seeping, open wound on my shoulder. He feared it could be melanoma. The results came back negative thank God, but that mole is just one of what must be thousands that freckle my body. Now I live in fear that this army of black speckles will one day take a turn. Could they possibly mutiny into melanoma? The answer is yes.
As a teenager I stayed out in the sun all day and religiously used tanning beds as part of my beauty regimen. This summer, however, I was a gold-star dermatological patient; I applied and re-applied SPF, kept my clothes on for the most part and spent prime sun time underneath the umbrella. But, the damage has been done. While observing me under the UV lights, both my dermatologist and my surgeon have commented something along the lines of, “You were a sun worshipper when you were younger, weren’t you?”
I’ve cheated death once and I feel like I won’t be able to do it again.
So, I’ve started to research how to prevent my cancer from coming back. What I’ve found is essentially the same advice I’ve been reading in women’s magazines since I was a teenager: Stay out of the sun, eat more fruits and vegetables while limiting red meat and processed food. The American Cancer Society says I can try to stave off a recurrence by exercising and limiting alcohol. As a twenty-something who exercises five times per week, eats mainly salads and only drinks on weekends all these suggestions tell me one thing. There’s nothing I can do.
I’m a cancer survivor and now my chances of it coming back are increased. What’s more is that cancer runs in my family. Both my mom and my paternal aunt are breast cancer survivors and my sister survived thyroid cancer. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do my best. I’m not overweight, I don’t smoke, I eat as cleanly as possible and now I’ve also abandoned my yolo-ing ways of binge drinking and sun worshipping.
The day of my surgery the doctor’s assistant held up a mirror so I could see my newly-sutured scar. Shocked by the size of it, I said, “I’m going to be hideous!”
“You’re going to be alive,” she replied.
It’s true – I’m alive and am doing my part to stay that way. I can only hope my body returns the favor.
These are the three elements that are the foundation to exciting data visualization. Design isn’t just about polishing up data. Look no further than Apple, Inc., to see how foundational design can be in an organization.
On the other hand, data scientists must also align analysis with art. Artists ask the important questions business executives may not have considered. Plus, data artists excel at breaking down boundaries in creativity. No one understands this better than Jer Thorp, Co-Founder of the Office of Creative Research and Former Data Artist in Residence at The New York Times.
HH: What does it mean to be a data artist?
JR: There are two rough reasons why people call themselves a data artist. One of those reasons is people who are doing things kind of outside what we think of when we think of data science or when we think of statistics and maybe combining design to do data visualization and then there’s the second group of people who are working with the data as part of a larger art practice. Myself, I think I straddle both sides of that border. So, I run the office called the Office of Data Research where we do a lot of data focused R&D work for companies like Microsoft, Samsung and Intel. We do a lot of design work. We do a lot of data visualization tools to try to solve really weird and interesting data problems and then the other side of it is we also have an art practice where we build often physical, sculptures that can be built in physical spaces and museums and galleries. We just finished a long artist in residency at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and we’re just starting a gigantic project to install a piece in the Boston Public Library. So, for us – and for me – the term data art is really wide-ranging.
I interviewed Jer Thorp, co-Founder of the Office of Creative Research and the former Data Artist-in-Residence at The New York Times
Let’s talk about the “weird and interesting” part of data. How can the human side of data lead to innovation and effective change within an organization?
I use the term “humanizing data” a lot. In some ways it’s kind of a given. Data doesn’t exist without humans and if we think of data as the measurement of something, that act of measurement is by default a human measurement. We have machines that are doing the measurement as a proxy for us, but at the root of it, data is really a human thing. We’re producing it. I think where it really gets problematic is when we’re talking about data that is a measurement of humans. Even something as simple as location data or survey data that comes from customers or whatever the case it may be, there is something there that becomes ethically interesting and ethically complicated because we do need to consider the humans that are the systems from which that data is being generated. In a business sense, I think this is a challenge and an opportunity.
It’s a challenge because we can do things with this data very easily. There’s no permission form. I don’t even have to talk to these people. I can just use their data and away I go on my merry way. The problem with that is that if I cross a boundary that is either uncomfortable or negative in some way towards these people then I can breach their trust. That is a thing you definitely don’t want to be doing as a business because it can lead to a situation in which your consumer base loses trust in you. That’s why I also say data presents an opportunity because I think there are precious few companies right now who are seeing this as a chance to set themselves out from the crowd and say, ‘hey, unlike all these other organizations out there, we’re going to be fair with your data, we’re going to be transparent with your data and we’re going to use your data in a way that will make sure that you still trust us.’
I think we’ve been lucky in the last 85 years because we’ve been able to get away with a lot of things with consumer data without consumers being aware of it and now I think that’s changing. And, so these companies –hopefully there will be more and more who are putting the right foot forward and saying we want to be an ethical company – are going to have a tremendous advantage.
Could you provide an overview or example of the business application of creative data-focused research?
Research is the most important word. It really comes down to innovation at a true level. I fundamentally believe that you can’t have innovation without a certain amount of risk and without a certain amount of limitation. So, for lack of a better term, creative data exploration – or data art – provides an avenue to experiment and to try new things that otherwise wouldn’t be tried in the everyday course of data analysis or data science.
I believe there’s huge value in trying things. I have this phrase I use when I describe our work, which I call “question farming.” In a lot of cases what we’re doing is confirming the suspicions that we already had or trying to find answers. We hear a lot about using data to find answers. But, I think it’s just as important to use data to find questions. There are a lot of questions that we don’t even know how to ask yet. It’s those questions that lead to true innovation, when you get to say, “hey, we never thought about it this way, but what would happen if we try this new thing?” and it’s the nature of those questions that are not just available sitting in your bathtub. You need to try new things and you need to prototype and you need to take risks.
It’s not a particular surprise that if we look at the history of successful companies over the last 100 years, largely those are companies with strong research and development groups and I think that there are a lot of companies who we talk to who have trepidation about investing in R&D because there’s so much risk involved. But, you have to take a chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to be willing to understand it’s a risky investment.
Many analysts have to prove the quality and integrity of their data to their high level executives. But, they’re working in such a siloed structure that it’s kind of a struggle to present the data in a meaningful way that’s readable, but not based solely on the human factor.
What are your tips for bridging that gap and secure executive buy-in?
First of all, data and integrity go together hand-in-hand. With the data that we work with, even though it skews to a more creative axis, data integrity is fundamental to our work. We are always very careful to make sure that the data that we’re using is sound; and that we’re representing it in the right way, that we’re aware of its biases, that we’re aware of its errors, that we’re aware of its missing data and so on, and so on. Part of the answer to the question is to be honest about those types of things. There’s no such thing as perfect data. One of the things that I always found that instills a little bit of trust in data visualization or a data presentation is if there’s some honesty about those types of issues.
I have a principle I sit on when I’m doing data visualization, which I call the “Ooo-Ahh” principle, which means that a good data visualization should do two things at the same time: The first thing it should do is capture people’s attention. That’s like the “Ooo” moment. The second thing it should do is teach somebody something, which is the “Ahh” moment. When you’re presenting data to the CEO or whomever your stakeholder is, there’s a balance that has to be achieved because you want to invest enough in the “Ooo” that they’re not just going to skip over the figure or the chart that is the “Ahh” moment. You want to show them something that’s going to be engaging. But, you can’t do that in sacrifice of “Ahh.”
The reason why there tends to be conflict between data and aesthetic is that the mistake is to sacrifice clarity for aesthetic. That doesn’t have to happen. You can have your cake and eat it, too. So, we can have a data visualization that carries all the information that we want, but it adds some visual flavor and design treatment, which makes it so that it’s more memorable, it’s more attractive, it’s more readable.
“I use the term ‘humanizing data’ a lot. In some ways it’s kind of a given. Data doesn’t exist without humans and if we think of data as the measurement of something, that act of measurement is by default a human measurement. We have machines that are doing the measurement as a proxy for us, but at the root of it, data is really a human thing. ” – Jer Thorp
In previous talks, you talk about the lack of dialogue between three elements of data; Science, Art and Design. Can you tell us a little bit about how organizations can address this issue?
Multidisciplinary data is something I truly believe in. Envision those three circles in the Venn diagram – the more overlap there are the more productive the result is going to be. Starting with the boundary between data science and design: I was having a conversation with a large organization the other day who was talking about how great it was that they just finished a project, it was all working, and then they brought it to their design team and they were amazed by what the design team was able to do in a couple of hours with this thing to make it better. I turned around to them and said, “If you think that’s good, imagine if you had decided to work with the design team from Day One.” What if this project had design as one of its elements? You probably would have ended up with something of inordinate magnitude than you actually did. I think one of the misconceptions that people from the data world have about design is that design is just about making things look good. But, design is a lot more than that. Design is a way of thinking and by bringing designers into the process early is that the results will get better and better and better. We just have to look at Apple to understand how foundational design can be in an organization. That’s one of the reasons why they’re so successful is that design is baked into the organization from the ground up.
On the other end of the Venn diagram is the art. I’ve been a huge advocate of recommending companies do artist residencies, which I think are such an incredible opportunity for everybody involved. Bring an artist in for six months, set them up at a desk and they will come in and work with your data and your employees and make something incredible. One of the things that the artists are really good at is asking questions that you may not have thought of and they’re all so good at breaking down boundaries in creativity.
This is a thing that has a deep history and it has a deep history that really works and it’s not just something to do for fun. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past year with this woman named Lillian Schwartz. She was the artist in residence at Bell Labs for 35 years between 1960 and the early 1990s and a lot of the transformative things that came out of Bell Labs at the time were little pieces that Lillian had assisted in, starting with answering questions and also doing some real work on these projects as well.
Jer, it’s very clear that you love what you do, or at least you very much enjoy it. But, do you ever struggle or suffer from data fatigue? What kind of tips would you provide analysts who are struggling with this and maybe aren’t able to discover new questions or answers to the data that they’re processing and reading?
There are a couple of answers to this question. For individuals who are working with data and for executives who are working with teams of people working with data is to find ways to continually make the data fun. What it might be about is that every second Friday of the month there’s a Hack Day, in which you bring in a totally new data set that maybe isn’t related to a current project. It could be one of your teammate’s location data. It could be something pulled from the Internet or your email history from the last two years. The idea is to get into data to exercise their muscles that have been lying dormant for a little bit.
At the center, we’re always trying to find these small tasks and sets of data to use as small experiments to get our minds off the “real job.” That has been really effective for us. It’s important to remember that data analysis isn’t all about sitting in front of your computer. Any data set has a lot of real grounding in the real world. There are resources you can read and things that you can watch to be more informed of where the data came from and that will allow you to do a better job of visualizing it or analyzing it or whatever it is you might be doing.
I should take a moment to shout out to one of my best friends who runs DataKind, which tries to take really great scientists and pair them with non-governmental organizations that have data problems. DataKind will plan a Hack Day where they’ll bring in data – maybe it’s from a cancer organization or a company that’s doing irrigation work in Africa and is need of data scientists to read the data for them, but they don’t have the money to pay them. So, it’s a nice way to tackle a really hard problem, promote team building and also do some good.
Hannah Hager 