Designing at Scale

Margaret Gould Stewart

When you're designing at scale, little things really matter. Margaret Gould Stewart, Director of Product Design at Facebook, gave us a peek behind the scenes of that design process, as she described the challenges facing the team managing the Like button on Facebook. A team to manage the Like button. Amazing. But when you're designing something that will be used 22B times a day, around the world, in different languages and cultures, you have to do it very carefully.

Just as important as the design is the manner of introduction. Margaret recounted her careful introduction of the rating system for YouTube videos when she was at Google. Although there were 5 ratings, evaluations were clustering almost exclusively around 1 or 5. They carefully shared that rationale with users and had a graceful introduction.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

If you're fascinated by books or technology or typography or crytography or technology or intrepid quests or the Singularity or data visualization or puzzles or secret societies, you will like Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.  If you like all of them, you will love this book.  I loved this book.  I think I had a smile on my face the whole time I was reading it.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a strange place, located next door to a strip club (funny thing, my first office when I arrived in Calgary was next door to a strip club!) The bookstore is more vertical than horizontal, with high shelves reached by precarious ladders. There are a few normal books in the front half and a very occasional customer.  The back is filled with mysterious tomes containing coded information, borrowed by an odd assortment of eccentric characters who are members of the Unbroken Spine society.

Clay Jannon gets a part-time job, the night shift, in this strange bookshop and begins a great adventure.  You can almost feel the covers of these lovely old books and smell the bookstore smell. But it's not all about antiquarian books.

Atttracted by Jannon's highly targeted online marketing strategy, Google employee Kat Potente walks into the store.   Jannon woos Kat with a prototype program he's written.  "I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype."  Soon she and Clay are dating and the power of Hadoop's massive parallel computing, Mechanical Turk's crowdsourced human intelligence  and Google's complicated book-scanning device  (the device doesn't sound much like the NPR description of Google's patent by the way, but what the heck) are unleashed on a 500-year-old puzzle.  Medieval meets modern meets science fiction.  Did you notice that 3-second gap in all of Google's worldwide services when the Google Big Box reached out and all of Google's computers were brought to bear on this ancient puzzle?  Did you think that Google would stop at driverless cars and Google glass? No way.  In this book we learn about the Google Forever project working on multiple aspects of life extension, such as organ regeneration, DNA repair.

I loved Sloan's tongue-in-cheek style, his determination to include as many allusions to modern technology as possible, his corny puns and playfulness, like the reference to a drink called The Blue Screen of Death.  As a reader, one is tempted to look for coded messages in the book itself.  All of the numbers mentioned seemed to be prime numbers, until one item cost $16.50.  So much for that theory.

Sloan leaves a hook for a possible continuation at the end of the book and I can't wait to see if he writes a sequel.  This one was just so much fun to read.

Searching - for Power: the Internet and electricity consumption

Googleplex, Douglas County Georgia with banks of servers

Some years ago, I prepared a report for World Wildlife Fund on the ways that Information and Communications Technologies can help reduce carbon imprint.  Telecommuting, smart systems to regulate heating and traffic, teleconferencing and many other technology-enabled applications are helping.

But there is a dark side to technology and energy: big data centres consume about 2% of all electrical energy in the US in order to deliver us the instant response and vast storage we consider part of our Internet entitlement[1].  Google alone uses the equivalent of one quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant in its data centres around the world. [2]  Most of that goes not to powering the computers but cooling the environment they run in.

This makes electric power - and its cost - a strategic consideration for these companies.   For instance, Google locates its data centres largely based on the adequacy, reliability and cost of electricity.  Iceland and the Canadian North are making pitches as locations for such data centres, so as to use 'natural cooling'.   Not surprisingly, Google  has invested $1B in green sector ventures.

You may wonder why I am suddenly writing about this topic now, especially after an astonishingly long silence on this blog.  Well, a friend forwarded me some photos taken in various Google data centres, or Googleplexes as they're known.  The pictures show incredibly well organized technology, but they look like abstract art and they are just too beautiful not to share.

The back of servers in Oklahoma, where hundreds of fans (re)circulate cooled air

Server racks in Oklahoma with their cables, tidily coloured

Back-up tape library in South Carolina

Water is so critical to the cooling effort that a lot of effort is devoted to it, as you can see in these final pictures.

Water tanks in South Carolina hold up to 900,000 litres 

And my favourite pic of all:

Colourful water pipes in Georgia

Having started out in the business in 1970, I can remember big data centres, holding a laughable amount of data and computing power compared to today.  My personal back-up system can hold as much data those old huge farms of disk drivers.  And none of them were painted pretty colours either!


[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[2]  Again from New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/technology/google-details-and-defends-its-use-of-electricity.html