Left Brain Right Brain

Dr Temple Grandin is an Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She’s also a high functioning autistic. Her writings on the nature of autism have provided me with lots of interesting food for thought over the last couple of years since Megan’s diagnosis.

I recently read a fascinating article on her web site entitled My Mind is a Web Browser: How People with Autism Think. It provides an interesting viewpoint into the mechanics of cognition and thought process from an autistic perspective. It also started me thinking about the emotion associated with design and how it leads us to percieve the world around us. Autistic people find it very difficult to associate concepts with emotions:

Only by interviewing…(non autistic)… people did I learn that many of them think primarily in words, and that their thoughts are linked to emotion. In my brain, words act as a narrator for the visual images in my imagination.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of how we as designers should come to terms with the possibility that by creating interfaces designed to stimulate an emotional response we are possibly excluding a whole range of people, the more exciting possibility is that there may finally be a way to get a truly impartial test group for web site usability testings. What I’m suggesting is that if some autistic people are unable to easily (or even in some cases at all) associate concepts with emotions or have any kind of emotional response to a concept then we have a set of people that can give us totally impartial, unemotional, honest feedback on how usable our designs are.

Researchers have learned that people with autism have a decreased metabolism in the area in the frontal cortex that connects the brain’s emotional centers with higher thinking (the anterior cingulate)…[T]he emotion center in their amygdala is not activated, for example, when they judge expressions in another person’s eyes.

The trouble with NT users (NeuroTypical, the term autistic people use to describe non-autistics) is that we’re incapable of ignoring the impulses from the amygdala – we are emotional and design, either good or bad, will provoke an emotional response in NT’s. How many of you have been sorely tempted to leave in a stylistic element because it look great when you know it distracts from the impetus of the overall design or impacts negatively on the usability of the site? I know I have.

Obviously, I have to declare an interest in autism since my daughter is autistic. Because of this I know from experience that autistic people, like NT people, come in varying shapes and sizes – and abilities. I’d recommend that all designers think about employing some high functioning autistic people next time usability testing is needed. We’re talking about a group of people who are very analytical, very literal, very honest and won’t be swayed by the emotional hooks you used.

Don’t expect a lot of tact, autistic people don’t see the point of tact. You can however, expect a great deal of high quality feedback I’d think.

Megan’s been at mainstream school since September now and by and large is settling in well. By far the best aspect of her schooling is the willingness of the staff there to learn as much as they can about both Megan and autism. The school’s SENCO today came around with one of Megan’s Support Workers and spent an hour with us at our home – all to learn as much as they could about how Megan operates outside of school and how we deal with her, the aim being to try and replicate the methods we use in the school. Next week, she’ll be coming around again with Megan’s other Support Worker.

I know how lucky Megan is to have such a dedicated team. Today the SENCO told us that she’d booked Megan’s Support Workers on a day long course so they could learn even more about autism. Its fair to say that we’re totally blown away by the level and depth of support we’ve been offered and have recieved from this school and these staff.

Believe me when I say that a lot of kids with autism don’t get such good staff. I know of a case where a Mum with an adopted son who has autism was told (by a headteacher with no medical training) that he wasn’t autistic (despite his medical diagnosis) and that it was her fault he was so disruptive. Its impossible to explain to people who don’t have autistic relatives or friends just how hurtful remarks like that can be. It demonstrates the inability of most of society to look past the surface behaviours and see the person underneath. That an educator has failed this child so badly is inexcusable. In the case of this child, it turns out he was being bullied every break and meal time over a period of years. It came to a head when he fought back and floored the bully. Ironically, it was the disabled child who was threatened with expulsion. The bully was threatened with nothing at all.

So, we thank our lovely school and our wonderful educators every time we possibly can. We’re aware of how much difference a good teacher can make because we’re aware how much difference a bad teacher can make.

The Disabilty Rights Commission released a report earlier this year detailing the lack of understanding of accessibility amongst web designers and made some suggestions on how to counter this. Amongst these suggestions was…

The Government should..[snip]..promote a formal accreditation process.

This prompted a flurry of activity in the blogosphere detailing the overall findings and generating articles on the subject. The reaction to the idea of accreditation was mixed. Amongst accessibility advocates, this recommendation was mostly very favourably recieved. Amongst designers who care about web standards, it was generally accepted that this may be necessary and no bad thing and amongst non-standards advocates and non-design web professionals (such as search engine optimisation specialists) this recommendation was generally seen as unecessary and divisive.

I thought at the time that a formal accreditation for web designers was a great idea and I still do. Web design is still seen by the majority of decision-makers in business as a slightly lawless and mysterious field and designers viewed with an air of distrust. Some of this probably stems from the fact that in the old dotcom boom/bust saga a lot of designers paid no attention to responsible design and churned out beautiful, yet totally unusable web sites. Gradually, as web design as a profession has matured, designers are slowly coming around to the fact that successful web sites deal appropriately and responsibly with their visitors. However, in the business sphere, the old image of the web designer who plays on his X-Box all morning and knocks out a bit of fluff in the afternoon still holds true to a certain degree.

Its also, sadly, true to say that there were and still are a lot of bad designers out there. I’ve (rightly) got into trouble in the past for referring to these people as ‘bedroom designers’, which is misleading and unfair to those designers who do good work and yet do work out of their bedroom (or study). And yet, as soon as I used that phrase you probably had a good mental image of the type of ‘designer’ I’m talking about. I’m not going to stereotype them further.

There are bad designers out there and unfortunately, for awhile there, they were firmly in the majority. So much so that business people (who love to have meetings and ‘network’) spread the word amongst themselves about how terrible web designers were and how their new web sites didn’t do what they thought it would.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years and we now have a situation where designers are getting used to the idea that web sites need to be more than just pretty, they need to actually fulfill a function for their owners – even if that function is merely abstract rather than practical – and a large part of that is creating a site that has sound foundations. In fact, the situation has progressed so far that we’ve almost come full circle recently with leading designers saying that we’ve moved too far the other way and we should go back to letting design drive designers (in all honesty I can’t remember when this didn’t happen but thats another story). Unfortunately, the web design field is still very insular and doesn’t speak to business except in an accidental occurance and so the duckling-to-swan maturation of the web design field has largely gone unnoticed by the world of business. We’re still the X-Box playing superiors who sneer at their ideas and curse their lack of soul every time they mention ROI or the bottom line. Of course we’re not, but thats still the perception.

So whats the best way to let the world of business know that web design and web designers have changed? That we’re growing and maturing as an industry and we now understand the tools at our disposal and can apply them appropriately. Well, we can make ourselves accountable for a start and we can do that with an accreditation scheme.

Just like builders or travel agents have their bad apples, so do we. Just like them I think we need an accreditation scheme where a web designers competence can be checked. This would go a long way to restoring confidence in web design and web designers and allow business people to take heart from the fact that an accredited designer has had to demonstrate an ability in a number of concepts and skill areas. This idea is appalling and exclusionary to a lot of people and I’ve been accused of elitism many times when I’ve brought it up in the past but these people always missed the point: No one is saying that web designers have to be accredited or that non-accredited web designers couldn’t ply their trade. What I’m saying is that if a web designer wanted to become accredited then that can only be a good thing for them, their skillset, their future web sites and clients and not least good for the web as a whole and the reputation of web designers overall. Emphasis on inclusion rather than exclusion is what I’m saying.

That said, I think any accreditation process should be reasonably difficult to get. Too easy and its meaningless. So what areas should an accreditation process cover? What should a web designer be ‘tested’ on?

1. Validate a web site to either XHTML or HTML 4.01 Strict
2. Validate styles to either CSS 1 or 2
3. Make a web site accessible to at least Priority One (A) standards
4. Demonstrate an ability to work to a workflow that gives power to the client at key stages of the design process

Thats my ‘basic’ list. Thats what I’d like to see an accreditation scheme cover. It should be noted that I’m not suggesting that every web site a designer has built/will build should adhere to that criteria, more that a designer has shown they are capable of achieving that criteria. Its about giving web design back its credibility by helping business to have confidence in web designers at the end of the day, its not about a beauty contest for web sites.

Since implementing this redesign, I’ve recieved a few emails from people asking where my old site design is. This is the design that got a mention on CSS Beauty and on CSS Vault.

For those interested in perusing its grassy goodness, you can find it here. I still like it quite a lot which is rare for me – usually after a week or so I tend to end up hating the stuff I’ve done – and I do wish I could’ve carried it on into this blog layout. The reason I didn’t was due to the structure of the page. Its a ‘bottom heavy’ design which tends to impact negatively on a workable blog interface. I did try a variety of things to make the textual content appear over the top of the grass image which worked with varying degrees of success but none worked well enough to make the content consistently legible, which is kind of the point of a blog. I’m still trying to find a way to recycle this design as its very striking and I do like it freshness and simplicity a lot. Until then, a pink blog semed a nice, unobtrusive, calming sequel!

For, um, reasons beyond my ability to control I’ll probably not be updating the blog much over the next week or two.

Its just that, er, I’m really really busy and simply can’t spare the time for non-essential activities.

Or something.

About 3 weeks ago we decided to withdraw Megan’s nightly Vallergan medication (if you’re not sure what Vallergan is or why we’re using it then check the archives for links about sleep or Vallergan and all will be revealed).

We withdrew it because we thought it was making her less able to function properly. It seemed to be making her volatile and grumpy as well as affecting her cognition. Most worryingly, it seemed to be affecting her ability to communicate. As Megan doesn’t really communicate much anyway we really didn’t want to jeopardies what we did have. Besides, it was having less and less of an effect on her sleep anyway.

3 weeks in and we’re convinced we’ve done the right thing. During the day she’s much more sociable and alert. However, it has had a detrimental effect on her sleep. She now wakes up every night for between 2 and 5 hours, usually about 1am. We take it in turns to watch her but she also gets quite upset and 2 nights ago she had night terrors which is obviously upsetting for both her and us.

To be fair she’s also been ill so all these things could be caused by her getting over her cold but we’re not so sure. It seems we’re caught between the rock of non-productive sleep causing irritability and lack of communication and the hard place of lack of sleep for all of us, possible night terrors and upset.

I guess we just have to weigh all the pro’s and con’s of both situations but I really don’t want to have to medicate my daughter any more. It makes me feel really shitty to do that.

In a (typically) thought provoking post on Asterix D. Keith Robinson asks if the design community has become over-fixated on standards to the detriment of design.

He goes on to use building a house as a metaphor for web design and says that making a house with a sound structure requires standards but making a house your own requires design. All true. He finishes by saying that he thinks its time to get more design back into the mix.

This last sentence confused me a little as I don’t believe its ever gone away. There are plenty of examples on numerous sites of great design that happen to use web standards. I think design is a misused word in this context. Anyway, I went on to reply that in my opinion the truly interesting subjects regarding web design came about when a spotlight was cast on the point of juxtaposition between pure design elements and pure standards elements.

‘T’ posted a great link on the difference between style and design from an old Zeldman article which gets right to the core of the matter for me.

Style and how its implemented is that middle ground between design and standards. Style is the bit that overlays everything with the vision the designer had for the project and the process of recognising style and getting a style of one’s own is possibly the most important area that a new designer wishing to make their mark can concentrate on.

Its fairly easy to learn elements of design (why not to use tiny buttons or why a logo should go top left) and its also fairly easy to learn the rudiments of standards (how and why its important to make a site validate, how to structure a page effectively). Its in the area of the amalgamation of these two concepts of web design that style comes into play.

Lets not forget though that in design terms the web is still a very young medium. Style, to some extent, is an ambiguous thing and trying to find a unique style whilst working in a medium that has so not even decided on the best way to present itself poses certain challenges. I remember reading a blog that the designer had recently redesigned and someone commented that they were disapointed to see that the site looked ‘just like a blog’. The first thought that popped into my head was ‘um, thats because it is a blog.’ This tendency to change design just to fit a style is perplexing to me. Blogs will always be structured like blogs as thats the best way to present information of a blog-type nature. Just as e-commerce sites will always be structured like e-commerce sites and news sites will always be structured like news sites. These structural designs have evolved for a very good reason – they work.

None of this means that style should be ignored. Just as a house will almost always have windows, doors and roof’s, web sites of particular genres will always have their design rules. That doesn’t mean that all news web sites look like the BBC. Look at ESPN for example. Both it and the BBC present content of a type related to news. In terms of the design they are very similar but in terms of style very different.

How to cultivate a style is the million dollar question. You can look to your peers for design and standards insipration but looking to your peers for stylistic inspiration is fraught with dangers. Reproducing stylistic elements of your peers just means you are doing an online ‘cover version’ of their work. Thats not to say you shouldn’t look at your peers work and learn from them but copying whole elements of others work will stunt a designer rather than developing them.

If you’re interested in style, don’t just look at web sites. Look at web sites to see how each genre presents its content to an audience (design) and how the underlying solidity of code creates a stable environment (standards) but look beyond the web for your style. TV can be a good source of inspiration (I once admitted to a group of non-designer friends that the reason I watched a lot of TV Cookery programmes because I liked the ‘white on white’ cleanliness and simplicity of how some of them were visually presented – that got me some odd looks). I love the opening titles for the show ‘Six Feet Under’ and am finding the development of interactive digital TV a fascinating thing to watch as the designers on BBC News24 et al find ways to present more textual information on screen.

Nature has style. I was walking back from work one night when I was walking straight towards the back of a row of houses. It was a terraced street and each roof had a stylistic row of semi-raised tiles along the crest of each roof. As it was a terraced street this created an unending line of these crested tiles. The crescent moon was directly behind them and this made the crested tiles jet black. Contrasted against the bone white moon it looked great. I wish I’d had my camera with me.

What I’m saying is that its important to try and develop a sense of good style in everyday things. Once you can, you’ll start to almost subliminally apply that to your own work. At this point, between the pooling of the design elements and the standards elements of web design and where style comes to the fore is where you will find your own voice.

So here it is – the total sparkly shiny newness of my expanded site.

For those who used to read ‘Megans Progress’ you’ll find all those posts under the ‘Left Brain’ category. Sadly minus the useful and informative comments. The old blogging software I used couldn’t make a useable archive of the comments. I might try and manually insert them one day.

The new sections cater to my interest in web design and media. Its an eclectic mix and you can read the reasons for the category names if you so desire. There is a theme here, honest.

‘Oh no, another blog about design’. Yep. I’m not sure if I have anything useful or not to contribute but I’m of the opinion that more knowledge = good so, what the hell – can’t hurt can it?

For those of a geeky persuasion, I used WordPress to power the blog, Photoshop to make all the graphical elements and HTML-Kit to hand code all the styles and markup. It should validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2 but if you come across a broken bit, please let me know.

The sites been tested on IE5, 5.5 and 6, Opera 7.2, Firefox PR1.0, Netscape 7.0, Mozilla 1.6 for Windows XP and 2000 and Opera 7, Mozilla 1.6 and Firefox PR1.0 on Xandros (a Debian build I think). I don’t have access to a Mac so if anyone with a Mac encounters a screaming horror in Safari or Firefox please do me a favour and comment here. Ta.

Apparently in the version of WordPress I’m using, the ability to easily pass the category_id to the index page is broken. This is a shame because I needed it to display an icon for the category each post belongs to. A little judicious searching reveals the

get_the_category()

function, which you can extract the category_id from easily. This is how I did it:

So, we basically treat the function as an array and extract the appropriate key – in this case

category_id

From this point on, because I have a fixed number of categories that I know will never change, I compare the values and set a variable called

$headclass

which I then use in my tag attribute like so:

<h1 class="" >Some Heading

So, its now a simple matter to assign a style declaration for each possible category icon:

If you wanted to make this more dynamic (if you regularly added and removed categories for example) you could rename your images and classes for each category id number.

As is usual when I’ve not updated the blog for awhile, I’m just going to ramble in a general way to get everything updated.

So, Meggy’s been at school for nearly 6 weeks now. Just to refresh your collective memories she’s in a mainstream school with full time 1-to-1 support.

It started very brightly indeed. She loves going to school, of that there’s no doubt. As soon as you get her school uniform out her face lights up and she tries to get you to hurry the whole dressing/hair brushing process along as quickly as possible.

The first two weeks went brilliantly, she settled and met all her IEP targets. However, towards the end of week 2 we were growing a little concerned that the school weren’t ‘cracking down’ on her. That sounds awful but let me explain.

A lot of people with autism really need the structure of a rigid system of rules. It makes them feel much happier and settled. Without it, behaviour and comfort can both degenerate. Therefore we always try and let Meggy know that there are strict rules in place and she knows that Naomi and I are the ‘law-enforcers’. This isn’t to say we’re overly strict but the structure is there and is adhered to.

Anyway, weeks 3 and 4 confirmed our fears. Megans behaviour first at school, then later (and to a much lesser extent) at home started to degenrate. She pinched, scratched and hit her support worker and started on us, particularly me. Her sleep also became badly affected again at this time.

Now, we have a number of factors all coming into play here. Firstly we have the fact that Megan is in an entirely new environment, secondly we have the fact that she’s growing up and we have also have the fact that the rules in this new environment aren’t being rigorously enforced. As a behavioural specialist we spoke to (who is autistic himself) said, each new environment for an autistic person requires a new persona – how many times have you heard it said “He’s like a different person at school/work/wherever!”? Well, for autistic people thats literaly true.

We had a meeting with the school a week ago where we explained that Megan needs the rules and needs to know who the ‘rule enforcer’ is at all times and since then they have started to give her less leeway. The were only acting in what they thought was Megans best interests by cutting her some slack at first so this isn’t an issue of blame, rather lack of knowledge.

Megans behaviour has marginally improved over the last fortnight (you must remember to amply reward the good behaviour and even the abscence of bad behaviour “Well done for not having a tantrum! Good behaviour!”) but it will take some time before she’s comfortable and accepts the rules. The continued scratching is her ‘pushing the boundries’ to see if the rules will definitely be applied – remember she’s hoping that they will, she needs that reassurance.

We’re also tweaking her Homeopathy and its beginning slowly but surely to work. Her sleep pattern is still disrupted but better than last week.

We (well, her Nan at our asking) got her a large outside trampoline for her to bounce on when she gets home. I thoroughly recommend this to the parent of any autistic child!

In other news we’ve started giving her increased amounts of Vitamin B as it is apparently beneficial to people with autism. This is quite a new thing so we’re unsure as to its impact just yet….