Guest Post by Todd Toler: Don’t be Such a Scientist

Today’s piece is a guest post by Todd Toler, Director of User Experience at John Wiley & Sons. The book has been making the rounds at Wiley… so here Todd reviews the book I wrote about in June, Don’t Be Such A Scientist by Randy Olson. You can read more of Todd’s insights on user research, interaction design, and the direction of the UX discipline on his blog, www.solidstateux.com. I promise that you will be more intelligent after each visit.

Lately I’ve been confronted with how inefficient the dissemination of science information is because, well, scientists are such scientists. This is not only a problem of educating the general populace to achieve a degree of science literacy on the important issues facing society, (which is the sole focus of this book, it is a problem with scientists communicating amongst themselves. As Olson points out in the anecdote about Alexander Fleming’s act of stumbling upon penicillin in 1929, ineffective communication of scientific discovery costs lives. It took 11 years after Fleming published his results for anyone to cotton on to it. Why? Because he exhibited every trait that Olson lays out in this book. Fleming was too literal (his working title for penicillin was ‘mould juice’), and he had the storytelling skills of a filibustering U.S. congressman. Note this sentence from the original 1929 article’s abstract, published in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology: “It was found that broth in which the mould had been grown at room temperature for one or two weeks had acquired marked inhibitory, bactericidal and bacteriolytic properties to many of the more common pathogenic bacteria.” That sentence is saying – I’ve just discovered a friggin’ universal antibiotic! This is potentially the answer to the current medical scourge of mankind! But yet, because scientists are such scientists, it doesn’t say that at all.

Scientists do not only frequently exhibit the traits Olson points out (too cerebral, too literal, poor storytelling, and unlikeable), they are also hierarchical (far too much deference paid to reputation and pecking order in the science publishing world) and tradition-bound (communicating only in academic journal articles.) Even chemists, who on the whole hate writing and think 100% in terms of symbolic pictures of chemical structures, communicate primarily in wordy scholarly articles whose format has changed little since the invention of the printing press. Communication has been so bottled up in science-land for so long that it is little wonder that the blogosphere erupted with emotion, profanity, and honesty once scientists had a way to easily self-publish their true feelings (part of Olson’s evidence that scientists are unlikeable is the negativity and poo-flinging that occurs on science blogs.)

That being said, Olson excels in exposing the fundamental dichotomy of science – the tension between a negativity and scrutiny based culture that is a natural outgrowth of the hypothetico-deductive method, and the value that critical thinking and peer review have on the advancement of a discipline. He also ruminates on the question of how far should something get dumbed down in order to have an impact and make a ripple with an audience of non-super-experts? (note: Olson would say quite a lot) The UX and design worlds are infants by comparison to most scientific disciplines and the free-wheeling communication culture of conferences and blogs and tweeting , while fantastic for idea dissemination, result in a lot of superficial ideas passed off as revelatory ones and a lot of rehashing of the same basic discoveries (like personas, or the power of sketching an idea) over and over again. It makes me wonder sometimes if collectively we are advancing the paradigm and moving humankind forward in the way that most science can lay claim to. In that sense, I don’t think most design professionals are such scientists at all.

In another sense, I’m with Bella on how I saw so many shades of myself in what Randy was advising against. This book is an excellent briefing on the power of effective communication as perfected by the people that make the most money off it – moviemakers. Most of us are too cerebral, too literal, too negative, and poor storytellers. Scientists are a vivid villain. Everyone already has nerdlike exaggerations of the anti-communicator in their heads when they picture a scientist, so Olson’s using of them (and himself) as the foil here works to good effect. But many other professions could easily stand in for their lack of mastery in all matters of communication style. Since Randy has gone full Hollywood, I’m eagerly awaiting the inevitable sequels (can I put a request in now for Don’t be Such a Project Manager? And Don’t be Such a Developer?)

-Todd Toler