I remember an episode of Star Trek where the crew were visiting the Bi-Weekly Ironic Techno-Utopian Planet™. In an offhand way, one of the Techno-Utopians demonstrated a Utopian Creativity Machine™ that could transform thought into sculpture, or something like that. In the mind of the writers, this demonstrated the obvious superiority of the Techno-Utopians, both technological (“the machine reads your mind and makes sculpture!”) and social (“we don’t squander our technological prowess on trivia like war.”). The subtext was that such superiority was beyond the ken of Earthlings four centuries hence—let alone Earthlings of the present era. Of course, this show was produced a few years ago (late 1980s?) so times have changed a little, but we already have Utopian Creative Machines™. We call them “computers”. Volumes have been written on the creative potential of computers (and, by extension, the Internet), so I won’t go there. Here’s where I’ll go instead: computers allow unhandy people to make things.

I owe the entireity of my creative vocation (and avocation) to computers. I don’t mean this only in the sense that my primary medium is the Internet...I mean that I created much fo anything before I began using computers to help me create. (I’m using the term “creativity” in the broadest sense here. That is, the act of creating anything: term papers, artwork, websites, fun software widgets...etc.) I’m the kind of person with black thumbs, both of which are apparently left. My knowledge of bicycle repair, for example, came at the cost of hundreds of dollars of broken bicycle parts. The only houseplants that do well in my house are cacti...and I’ve killed a few of those as well. My sketches from art classes are smudgy and indistinct. When I was seven years old my teacher put one of those rubber triangles on my pencil in a vain effort to reform my penmanship. All my attempts at oil changes end in bitter tragedy. Whenever I’m forced to manipulate actual atoms to repair, create, enhance, or modify something, those atoms wind up resenting me. Creating things with atoms means having good form, never messing up (or gracefully converting mess-ups into something positive). If you mess up an atom, it stays messed up. Forever. For the length of human history until perhaps the 1970s, “creativity” was roughly synonymous with “being skillful with your hands.”

Electrons, by contrast, are forgiving, plastic little souls. They cheerfully wink in and out of existence on command. If you offend them somehow, you can undo your offenses. With electrons, form is nonexistent—numbers are perfect already. “5” means ::. whether you write it “five” or “fünf” or 五. Creating things with electrons is a totally zen experience. I usually begin with a mathematically precise picture of my final product and just start creating it. If, in the course of creation, my internal picture changes, I can change the electrons to match. In the digital world, creating a thing is about a difficult as imagining a thing. Since the birth of the personal computer, “creativity” has also taken on the definition of “being skillful with your mind.”

I call myself an “Information Anthropologist” because I can’t think of any other way to describe what I do. My business hovers over the intersection of graphic design, technology, and user experience. I could call myself a “Jack of All Trades” (which is kind of true), but this always precedes “Master of None.” I see it the other way around: web design, web development, and user experience design are each sufficiently simple that a motivated individual can master all three.

For a web designer, the techniques of anthropology and archaeology have surprising utility: ethnography (of users, of organizations, of clients); stratigraphy (of data models); seriation (of content); and oral history (all those meetings). Anthropology taught me to think, to open up abstract concepts and see how they work. It taught me the value (and arbitrariness) of conceptual organization, and the greater value of getting computers to do the organizing for me. It taught me to draw maps, use computers, make databases, do math, and write coherently.

In studying anthropology (in particular, archaeology), I gained a key insight into human behavior. I saw firsthand that behavior produces artifacts, data trumps anecdotes, and anyone can say anything. Which is a nice way of saying “trust what people do, not what they say they do.” I further realized that people, collectively, don’t move at random. Individuals may have inscrutable purposes (i.e. their explanations for their behavior may be bullshit), but behavior is transparent in aggregate, when you regard human behavior as a kind of quantum phenomenon.

From archaeology I learned the value of fieldwork: theory is nice, but results are better. Archaeologists regard colleagues who shun fieldwork as ponderous blowhards. I was already predisposed to this mindset, but archaeology really ground it in: if you didn’t actually dig at the site, how can you know anything about it? Probably the unkindest thing I could say about someone is “all hat, no cattle” — a big talker but a slow walker.

No one can take more than two anthropology classes without realizing there’s nothing particularly special about your own culture. Polygamy, for example, has wider currency than monogamy, in most cultures and throughout most of history (this fact reliably blows undergraduates’ minds). The vogue these days is to decry such a perspective as “cultural relativism,” but there it is anyway. I love western culture (in particular American culture), but to nomadic yak herders, Free Market Capitalism, the Protestant Work Ethic, and the Constitutional Separation of Powers might seem like quaintly byzantine social posturing. And I’m sure I would find much of Nomadic Yak Herder culture unlettered or superstitious, but without which they could not imagine their universe. Such a perspective has nothing to do with web design, but, like realizing the universe does not revolve around the Earth, it does keep a person humble.