Cargo Cults

It's also not clear that the story told about the 'primitve' folks and their weird mistaken beliefs is actually a historically accurate one. Which the wikipedia article also addresses in part.

I find a blog post that just regurgitates the 'cargo cult' metaphor as if the author had invented it, and also without doing any research into the accuracy of the actual story he's telling about "Papua New Guinea" -- to be kind of insulting to the reader, and lazy on his part.

"A comparison of status relationships in the different “fields” shows a definite common pattern. The dominant feature, which makes status relations among the Econ of unique interest to the serious student, is the way that status is tied to the manufacture of certain types of implements, called “modls.” The status of the adult male is determined by his skill at making the “modl” of his “field.” The facts (a) that the Econ are highly status-motivated, (b) that status is only to be achieved by making ”modls,” and (c) that most of these “modls” seem to be of little or no practical use, probably accounts for the backwardness and abject cultural poverty of the tribe. Both the tight linkage between status in the tribe and modl-making and the trend toward making modls more for ceremonial than for practical purposes appear, moreover, to be fairly recent developments, something which has led many observers to express pessimism for the viability of the Econ culture."

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/05/axe...

Kanban-style inventory replenishment is amazing for the automobile industry and manufacturing in general, but would be a disaster for package fulfillment for the likes of an Amazon warehouse. Logic Programming languages have been amazing at building Business Rule Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence agents, but fail miserably at programming device drivers and OS kernels.

Likewise, the buzzwords that most people identify as meaningless buzzwords(eg. Object-Oriented of 15 years ago or Cloud Computing of 5 years ago or Big Data today) all have legitimate uses. And while most CEOs only pay lipservice to the concepts, you have no idea if those "buzzwords" are actually helping them out. You may think they look foolish, but they may be using it, in their context, very profitably.

The real lesson you should learn from Cargo Cults has nothing to do with avoiding buzzwords and the people that spout them. It is that you should learn how to identify appropriate vs inappropriate abstractions to the problems you face.

As a UX professional, I'm often told that we can just copy the menus in someone else's product, or the colors they've chosen, or any number of other decisions they've made about form and function.

It's why you see printers with touchscreens where buttons would actually work better, cars with vestigial body effects that do nothing, skeuomorphic elements where none belong, or "flat UI" where a bit of skeuomorphism would have helped the user.

There's no substitute for starting from user and business needs, instead of "what do the other guys do?"

I'd love it if more people started dismissing the idea of "cargo cult design."

The problem is that except where you are familiar with all the relevant technical details (and I mean technical broadly here), you end up having to fall back on other methods of evaluation. In the best case, you'll have the advice of an expert who is truly familiar with the relevant details, or enough of them to form good approximate insights.

Probably at least some of the time, though, you don't have access to that expert (or, worse, you're not equipped to distinguish an expert from a bozo). So, you back on heuristics... like social proof and examples of success...

The Wikipedia article on cargo cults is surprisingly fascinating:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

http://www.burningman.com/art_of_burningman/bm13_theme.html