Goold’s Macbeth & its powerful hidden metaphor

Background & setting

Rupert Goold’s version of the infamous Macbeth was introduced to the BBC audience in 2010 and had since received many positive reviews for its modern take on Shakespeare’s classic play.

The movie isn’t just tragic. It’s dark, hideous and undoubtedly the most successful horror adaptation of Macbeth. Goold sets up Macbeth’s events in the Post World War II world with his main character, Sir Patrick Stewart, somehow represent a cruel dictator like Joseph Stalin, leader of The Soviet Union.

The movie features a claustrophobic environment full of brutal executions and wicked minds that makes us long for fresh air. Ironically, the only outdoor scene is when Macbeth & Lady Macbeth bid farewell to Banquo while at the same time planning for his demise. It’s that scary and intense!

As for the casts, Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth is masculine, vigorous and full of madness. He played an exceptional Macbeth that scared us even when he was just cutting the sandwich. Perhaps his best moment is when he recreated the “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” scene. He had it all in him when he talked about Duncan’s end: his low voice, his slow pace, his demonic howling sound, his emotionless and ambitious eyes.

This scene also reminds us of how smart a director Ruper Goold is. He utilized a direct camera view, slowly zooming in on Sir Patrick Stewart and allowing us to see the actor’s magnificent performance. At the end of this scene, Patrick was seen walking out from a dark tunnel, with light going off behind him. The background music started reverberating and slowing down as if it tried to grasp our lungs. Macbeth had not made his move, but we already felt his killing intent.

However, Patrick’s Macbeth would not shine if we lack the cunning Lady Macbeth, who is played by Kate Fleetwood. She is just pure evil. Her image, with high cheek, protrude bone structure and deep eye sockets, sucks the life out on your first sight. Her icy manner was so good that sometimes it threatened to rise about Patrick Steward’s performance.

The metaphor

However, the most brilliant aspect of this modern adaptation is that it constantly forces you to question your interpretation through the use of effective graphic devices.

For example, Lady Macbeth’s downfall into insanity was painfully depicted, making her sympathetic and comprehensible as a real human. Thus the news of her leaving gave us a sense of relief when we knew that she would no longer suffer from her sinful life. Or was it?

After Macbeth looked at his wife for the last time, the three witches came and took her corpse. What is the meaning behind this scene? Was she taken by fate? Was she free of her suffering?

That brings us to the role of the Weird Sisters in Goold’s film. Since the movie took place in the Cold War’s setting, the three witches took on new identities. Most of the time they dressed like nurses or servants, yet acted as neither.

Right from the opening scene, we had a taste of how gruesome the Weird Sisters were. The camera constantly focused on the bunker’s narrow corridor, with three weird womanly shapes twisting, twitching & hissing in high pitch. The next thing we knew, they pulled out the heart of a living man and sticking it to a blood supply bag to keep it beating. The witches scenes were perhaps some of the most mesmerizing scenes in the whole movie.

In the original text, the Weird Sisters represented fate. If we were to accept that metaphor, it would mean that fate almost took control over how the plot was laid out. The three witches constantly lurking behind the curtain and appearing in key timing. They were in Macbeth’s kitchen when King Duncan arrived. They served the food in Macbeth’s dining hall when Macbeth saw Banquo’s ghost. They performed necromancy to give Macbeth his prophecies.

In Macbeth’s final moment, when he realized that Macduff was technically not of woman born, Goold made a slight modification from Shakespeare’s original text to highlight the important of fate to this tragedy. Macbeth tried to kill Macduff with a gun, but his first shot missed Macduff’s heart by an inch. His second shot was unfortunately out of bullet.

When Macbeth had the upper hand in the dagger duel with Macduff, the witches appeared again. To them Macbeth said: “Enough”, as if he had finally accepted defeat against fate. No matter how hard he tried to mitigate his threats, including killing Banquo & Macduff’s entire family, the prophecy turned out to be true. So when fate, or the Weird Sisters, intercepted his fight with Macduff, he refused to listen to further prediction because nothing would change.

However, the problem with this interpretation is that it defines fate as a very powerful mechanism that led to Macbeth’s demise. But is it?

The witches kept hanging around as if they wanted to ensure that events happened as they had predicted. They were everywhere so that in case something sidetracked, they could shape it back the way they wanted.

With this interpretation, were the controllers of fate then better than Macbeth, if they also acted in the same way? That ultimately they both obsessed over fine detail control. And was fate so powerful that no man could resist? If it is, why then did the Weird Sisters keep popping up? Wouldn’t they already know what was going to happen? What was the point of monitoring events?

Another way to look at the Weird Sisters when they intercepted Macbeth’s fight with Macduff is that they were beacon of his final moment. Similar to how the witches took Lady Macbeth’s corpse when she left her life behind. But where would the witches take the couple to? Heaven didn’t seem that likely. That brings us back to the very first question: Were Macbeth and his wife finally released from their sins?

In Goold’s film, there was a very subtle but interesting metaphor device: the “cage elevator”.

The cage elevator is an old elevator type, having no automatic door like the one we use now. Instead, it has a metal folding door and the operator has to close it himself before choosing which floor to go to. However, with such a dark setting, the “cage elevator” almost seemed like a prison to the Macbeth couple – a prison that they locked themselves in without realizing the despair it brought.

The cage elevator appeared very early in the movie, when Macbeth & Lady Macbeth started their plan to kill Duncan, to the few closing seconds of the movie. Macbeth & Lady Macbeth were mostly seen to enter the elevator together. Each time the couple stood behind the elevator’s metal bars, their psychology got worse, though in a different way.

We saw how Macbeth changed from a generous & brave man to a relentless tyrant whose hands full of blood. We also saw how Lady Macbeth broke down from a cunning character to an insane sympathetic creature. All these changes were brilliantly captured through the cage elevator snapshots.

Perhaps the most captive scene of the cage elevator was its final presentation when everything was over. The camera moved through different deserted landscapes in Macbeth’s castle only to finally loom in the cage elevator, with Macbeth & Lady Macbeth imprisoned inside. Blood covered their bodies and souls taken away from their faces.

This, perhaps, is the clearest answer to whether the couple were released from the deeds they had done.

The audit negotiation

Preparation in the black-art kingdom

Before this week’s negotiation simulation took place, I spent one day to research on negotiation tactics and decided the best approach to persuade my partner.

Since I had already read the book by Ronald Dawson “The secret of power negotiation”, I ran through many combinations in my head. I even considered black-art tactics such as initial extreme offer, the long silence, or lessening my partner patience by being an asshole.

However, these tactics failed to materialise because our prof, who “happened” to collect almost all famous published books about negotiation, “happened” to tell the whole class about these approaches. So similar to the previous simulation, I went into battle with no concrete plan because what I prepared had all been busted.

The last thing I could count on was my patience. And luckily, I seemed to possess a bit more of that compared to my partner.

Going into battle. Or is it?

For this week negotiation, we received a complex one with 8 issues. And if we couldn’t agree on ALL 8 terms, we would reach an impasse despite whatever amount of effort we spent. To make matters worse, there was a pre-defined range that we had to succumb to. For example, my goal as a buyer was to get a price as cheap as possible. Yet, there was a cap of $220,000. That meant even if I achieved $210,000, it would still count as a failed term and as such, the contact could not be signed.

I figured out that if I couldn’t understand what my partner value, I would never been able to find a leverage to help boost my favourable issues. In order to achieve that, I would need to trust my partner to be a rational negotiator and approach the game with the mindset of finding a common ground for our problem. A typically nice-guy approach isn’t it? I thought that it would be easy to implement. Yet, emotion swings bigger than I expected.

I set out by asking her whether she had any preferred issue that she wanted to discuss. But she did not have one and instead through me a very high price of $320,000. The max I could take was $270,000!!! That was way above my range. Hence, I got defensive and we began nitpicking over the audit fee.

I was much more cautious in cooperating with her. What followed was very similar to the coffee negotiation where I tried to decline every concession she gave and insisted on a different open price. We got stuck in that issue for almost 15 mins and we didn’t reach a conclusion.

At that moment, my partner started talking about how tiresome this negotiation was. And that stroke me really hard! What had I done?

Basic user experience strategy: listen to your user

I stupidly fell into my own trap of playing the mind game too much and forgot about helping her out. I forgot to consider one simple situation that we could have 2 different ranges and therefor lead to her extreme initial offer.

Instead, I thought that she was trying to use the black-art on me! What was more horrible was that I spent 1/3 of the time allowed bargaining over 1 issue in the total 8!!!

I was supposed to be listening to her problem and find out her painful issues. Had I allowed her to talk, we wouldn’t have wasted that much time. Had I allowed her to talk, I could align our benefits and reach for a total bigger piece (or a win-win game).

I went back to my root in user experience design and treated the negotiation as a problem finding session. It changed the course of the negotiation to a better path.

I took a deep breath. That helped calming me down a bit. After that, I started telling her what I was most concern about and which issues I could be more lenient. She did become more opened and we quickly reach agreement on 4 issues. These 4 issues later turned out to be compatible issues and integrative issues. We got the best total outcomes for these problems!

Be patient, m’young lady!

However, since time started to run out, she became more rushed and lost her calmness (which I believe is the only thing you shouldn’t lose during a negotiation!). She looked more nervous and concerned about time than me. Thus, I knew that I could win this by refusing to comply to any of the 4 remaining issues and push these very near to the closing time.

We didn’t have a deal when we walked back to class! This meant that we agreed on an impasse, an undesired state, even though my total gained point was above 3000 (my resistance point). I knew that I was greedy but I decided to take the risk since I had always been an adventurous guy.

Thus I made her the final suggestion before we entered the class: I would trade my audit fee (which gave the highest point among the 8 issues and also happened to be her most important issue) for the other 3 issues. Very quickly, I had her agreed on my favorable term for the other 3 issues. The total point gained from the 3 issues was far above the point I lost for the audit fee. This resulted in me arriving at 5800pts and her getting 4600pts. I was on the better side of the deal once again!

I like both negotiation simulations I had until this point because they gave me one hell of a mind challenge. Being able to turn the situation around on your feet is a very excited feeling that I would always dive in.

However, for this audit simulation, I and my partner were 400pts away from the optimal score. That was a bit sad. I could have realised the nature of the game, a win-win one, earlier and wouldn’t waste 15 mins. That would give me more time to set up and discuss over integrative terms.

On the similarity of negotiation and design

During the debrief, my prof mentioned something really fascinating:

That things could be very complex but easy and those seemed simple could be immensely hard to get right.

This idea synchronise with me strongly since it is the basic motto in design that I’ve practiced for quite awhile:

Achieving simplicity without losing context.

In fact, it is quite common to see “designers” and product makers jam a bunch of functions into their applications. Imagine Photoshop or Microsoft Powerpoint and you will get my point. Those are very polished and complex applications. It’s easier to put both functions into a design instead of killing one. But that doesn’t make a product better. It makes the product more complex. And most of the time confusing to beginners.

Negotiation is the same. Between the 2 simulations, I believe the audit negotiation is more complex with 8 problems but easier to “get away” since you can trade off issues. So negotiators are generally happier because they can tell their boss that even they don’t get the price right, they achieve “some other terms”.

However, for this type of integrative negotiation, it’s harder to reach a win-win situation, which, to me, is the only true win when you play this game. Reaching a win-win situation enlarges the total piece for both parties and allow them to walk away with a good relationship.

To be able to achieve win-win, you got to be really understanding and listening to your partners. But that’s easier talk than done since we all have our ego. I almost lost the big picture during my audit negotiation!

And when you reduce the number of terms you negotiate for, the whole game becomes simpler since you only have a few terms to focus on. However, as seen with the coffee simulation, it’s harder for negotiators since they are fighting over scarer resources with lesser trade-offs available.

The best strategy is only achieved if you know what game you are playing.

On negotiation

I had my first class on Negotiation topic today. It was quite a fun class. We spent almost an hour practice a real life negotiation scenario, in which I played the role of a coffee seller. My task was to sell 10.000 pounds of high quality coffee bean at the price of no less than $6.50/pound.

We only had 15 minutes to strategize our negotiation process and in fact I did not come up with many good tactics to assure myself a sure win situation. The most I can think of, was just some reasons to counter my partner’s rationale if he was to ever use it. I was not clear in my mind how I was going to start the negotiation. And to me, that felt like the weakest place to ever be in a negotiation.

I knew that I had to open at a price higher than the bidded price of $7.95. And how I got to that is due to a draught in my coffee supply country, which reduced the total quantity grown and thus pushed the price up to $9. With a higher upper limit, I hope to stretch my Target Point a little bit further to $8.10/coffee pound.

Only until we started the actual negotiation did I really come up with a good plan. Well, it was actually thanked to my partner’s hint that my company was selling coffee to another F&B at the price of $5.95/pound. That scared me off for a few seconds though.

When I was digging for response to that statement, I came up with a strategy to bluff my partner! Basically I would split the coffee into 2 category, the high-end coffee, which was purchased from $8-10/pound and the low-end coffee that costed only $6-8/pound.

At that moments, the dots simply connect in my mind. And I knew exactly at that point that I would walk away better off than my partner. How, you ask? By telling my partner that if she wanted the low-end coffee, she would have to mix-and-match with the high quality coffee. The only thing left to decide was the quantity ratio. How much should I give in low quality coffee?

I made a mistake here by being nice and gave her 7000 pounds in low quality coffee. If she wanted to get 10.000 pounds, she would have to buy 3000 of my high quality coffee. I should have pushed the number of low quality coffee lower. I believe I could touch 6000-5000 and I would still be walking away better off.

Because for the low end quality coffee, I fixed my price at $6.75/pound ($0.8 increased compared to what we provided other companies in another area, according to her). I was successful at setting this base price for low end coffee thanks to the fact that there was a draught earlier in the discussion!!! Hence price increased for both high and low end coffee.

I tried to direct her focus on discounting the high end coffee. Since I put it at $9 initially, I knew that I would get off with at least $8 something. I achieved this by reducing my discount amount over time. Thus, I would started by giving her $0.5 off, then $0.3, and finally hit the nail to the coffin at $0.1 discount.

So near the end, I kept looking at my watch and hoped that I would successfully pressurize her through this nuance action. I put some more drama by saying things like “we have 10 mins left”, “oh it’s only 5 mins, we better get the deal signed”.

We did some math based on the different coffee type and arrived at an average price of $7.155. I believe that I could push the price of low end coffee higher. I could use the reason that her company was the only company in the area, and thus would put the delivery fee up another notch. She did counter this by saying her company would get the coffee from my source. However, I could further say that because her operation was not specialized in delivery, it would cost her more to set up and transport the coffee by herself. So basically she got a discount in the purchase price but overall increased cost.

I walked away winning. I knew that. Because I got more out of the difference between our RPs. However, the more I reflected, the more I believe that, realistically, I did a very bad negotiation.

Why? I used some make-up facts to deceive her. This drilled a very big hole in my strategy. Had she seen through my bluff, she could have easily asked for proof of the 2 coffee types in my documents. That would collapse my whole plan. If that happened, I would be in a much worse situation because I lied in a negotiation and she could just anchored on the low end price.

However, once I think about my responsibility if it was a real life situation, I surely put a lot of unnecessary problem on my company.

Our company did not have 2 types of coffee. What would it turned out in real life? I would have to package my coffee differently and hoped that she did not discover the difference between the 2 types of coffee. That put a lot of risks on our business. Not only the operational cost would rise, but also the brand image could be damaged because I did not deliver what I promised.

But moreover, I believed that I should try my best to reach a win-win situation in a negotiation. Not only does it make me feel better ethically, but also does it create a better long-term relationship that would benefit my future negotiation. The other term in the deal was that my partner would deliver the coffee themselves. I believe that this is a lost on their business, which my company could have helped them and as a result create an even better relationship.

At the end, I walked of winning but feeling like shit

A case study about designing calendar page for managers.

The situation

As a business student, I certainly do not act like one. Long gone the day I stick around school, do some HBR case studies and discuss group projects with my mates. Once I taste the triumphant feeling of building stuffs from scratch, especially after building the UI at the coolest online ticket platform in Vietnam, ticketbox.vn, there’s no going back.

So when opportunity presented itself, I immediately jumped and took a shot at part-time front-end/interface designing for another Singapore startup called Beensprout. This time, the focus is about social networking for non-profit organisations. My first task was to put together a calendar page for non-profit admin.

A little bit background about Beensprout targeted users. There are two types of users: the organisers and the volunteers. The calendar page is mainly for organisers to manage different activities they have. Yet, even among organisers, there’re different levels of authority. We have org admins, people who overlook the whole organisation’s activity. We also have activity managers, who take care of specific activities within the organisation. At the lowest power level, we have event helpers whose tasks are to coordinate with activity managers to hold successful events.

Initial stupid sketching excitement

The calendar I was tasked to design targets at org admins. The general instruction from my boss was just to “help them manage events”. So with stupid enthusiasm, I popped open my Paper53 app and sketched some interesting ideas.

The idea behind prototype 1 was that org admins could color-code activities and filtered displayed activities using a tagging system. However, I quickly faced the problem of too many activities per day, which would rainbow-ize days with lots of activities, making it very difficult for users to tell what activities they have exactly.

For the second prototype, I wanted to explore a different option where org admins could track the exact progress of each activity. This was achieved by not using a standard calendar but instead limiting the timeframe to a weekly basis and giving each activity a row of its own.

Yet, after the sketching excitement was over, I realized my fatal mistakes: both options were made from my assumption about the users, without any input from real org admins.

Fix it or it just becomes another Dribbble shot.

To prevent the DRIBBBLISATION of design (Padday has an awesome post about it), I took a step back and use what I learn from Ryan Singer of 37Signals when designing a web app. There were three high-level questions that I wanted to answer:

• What is the single task that the users are here for?
• How do users get to this page?
• What next after this step?

The answer to the first question seemed simple: org admins wanted to “manage” all activities and the calendar page should help them to do that. But there’s one thing I didn’t understand: What did org admins mean when they said they wanted to “manage”? What activities were they involved in? Did they decide what time an activity should happen? If yes, at what level of time detail could they interfere? Week? Day? Hour? Different time perspectives would certainly affect how flexible the calendar should be.

Seeing many potential questions similar to the one above, I decided to go back to the users for some chit chats. It turned out that my assumption about org admins wanting to look at detailed activities to help them schedule events was plain wrong. Scheduling activities was actually done by activity managers, which meant there would be a different calendar page for that.

To org admins, what they care about was not how detailed the activities were displayed, which rendered both my prototypes useless. Rather org admins wanted to have an overview of how “busy” the organisations were. The org admins believed that the more activities an organisation had, which meant more days were filled up with events, the healthier the growth of the organization.

For the second question, at that time, users could access the calendar page through a left hand side navigation via the “Activities” label, which my previous colleague had reserved when he built the page architect. But “Activities” didn’t seem so clear to users about its functionality.

Could the label change to “Activities overview”? And how else can org admins reached the calendar page? Could the calendar page be the landing page? Sort of like the dashboard in other web apps to provide an overview to users?

For this I didn’t really arrive at a good copy writing solution and had to leave it there for the moment. This was part of a bigger problem in navigation and I just didn’t want to digress myself. A separate problem should deserve its own time and researches before proposing any fix. Thus, I would have to push the problem to parking zone and come back later.

Then, there was still one big question left to answer: what should the users do next? Based on previous interviews, after the initial overview, org admins needed to chat with activity managers to check their event progress. Sometimes they needed to add a new activity and assign certain organisers to handle that activity. The UI then needed to facilitate org admins to find these tasks easily.

Optimally, actions should be built-in to the context so that they provides a natural and smooth transition from task to task.

Final objectives & design

With these inputs, I set out to decide my calendar page. Again, important ballpoints:

• Show healthy growth of the organisations through “filled/busy” days.
• Smart linking to next actions, including creating new activities, assigning organisers to activities, communicating to certain activity managers.

Now that I have real user inputs, it becomes easier to create and justify which wireframes should be the final.

Another 2 iterations and I finally arrived at a final prototype, which is currently implemented at our Beensprout Beta page.

Ps: the calendar styling is done with clndr.js, a js plugin that allow you to flexibly define the calendar markup. I highly recommend this plugin for customized calendar design.

Moroon Cocoon is found on M’Earth!

Test test test! Calling from the urban moron station! The world, can you hear me?

This is captain Moroon Cocoon speaking from Company of One. If you see this post, it means I finally kick my ass hard enough to start blogging.

From now on, the world is unlucky to receive the rant of another no name geek.