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Category: design

Good Money To Sing Into A Can

Published January 5, 2009 by cgerrish

Orpheus plays to the Muses

Often we like to look to the logic of an innovation to determine whether or not it will succeed. Perhaps instead, we should look to the music of an innovation. In the story below, ideas are transformed into tones to shelter them from the rough transit into the flow of time. Nietzsche’s Innovator seeks first to reach the ear and the heart, not the brain. The determining factor of survival is not truth or error, open or closed, logical or nonsensical— but whether a seedling can be planted and survive the rigors of natural selection. The Innovator speaking of his creation says: “…a seedling can only be destroyed– not refuted.”

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.
– Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

By welcoming “storms, doubts, worms, and nastiness,” the Innovator embraces change and the possibility of failure. It’s not enough for an innovation to be spun into the friction-less space of the mind, it must be planted in the soil and given the chance to grow.

Music and innovation are mixed together in the practice of design thinking. Imagine Apple’s products without the music of their design. Although music should not be confused with beauty. As the economy tightens, standing next to the next generation of innovative products, we’ll be on the look out for the Music Man, the Pied Piper and the next singer-songwriter.

The Gay Science
Book Two, Paragraph 106
Friedrich Nietzsche

Music as an advocate

“I am thirsting for a composer,” said an innovator to his disciple, “who would learn my ideas from me and transpose them into his language; that way, I should reach men’s ears and hearts far better. With music one can seduce men to every error and every truth: who could refute a tone?” “Then you would like to be considered irrefutable?” said his disciple.

The innovator replied: “I wish for the seedling to become a tree. For doctrine to become a tree, it has to be believed for a good while; for it to be believed, it has to be considered irrefutable. The tree needs storms, doubts, worms, and nastiness to reveal the nature and strength of the seedling; let it break if it is not strong enough. But a seedling can only be destroyed– not refuted.

When he had said that, his disciple cried impetuously: “But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I still have in my mind against it.”

The innovator laughed in his heart and wagged a finger at him. “This kind of discipleship,” he said then, ” is the best; but it is also the most dangerous, and not every kind of doctrine can endure it.”

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Only Connect: The iPhone Crosses the Bridge

Published July 12, 2008 by cgerrish

Alexander Graham Bell speaking into a telephone

The dashboard formerly known as “computing” is always already mobile. It’s when we try to think about mobile computing as a separate category, potentially having something to do with “telephones,” that we make a fundamental error. All computers have always been mobile; granted, the speed and practicality of moving them has improved enormously. And, shrinking the form factor to size of a pocket has also helped– there’s little real difference between a computer and a teleputer.

And, what do we mean when we say “computer?” In its most common usage, it refers to an appliance in the home or office that is used for certain kinds of activities. And this matches up nicely with Doug Engelbart’s idea of computing as an augmentation of human capability. Computers are valuable to the extent people can use them in the course of their lives. They have no value in and of themselves. Even when they’re crunching numbers and calculating astounding Bayesian probabilities, they’re doing so with human purposes as their program. If we focus on Engelbart’s idea of augmentation we can see that the form of a “computer” is unimportant.

After spending a very short time with Apple’s new iPhone software (version 2.0), it’s clear that the iPhone is not a telephone. The name of the device is a bridging mechanism; it creates a familiarity that enables dispersion into the Network. The actual use of the device has now crossed over that bridge. Telephones transmit voice over far distances; they are single purpose and that’s the derivation of their name. Any analysis of usage patterns of the iPhone will show that voice transmission will be a shrinking percentage of overall engagement with the device. The iPhone is not limited to the augmentation of our capability to transmit voice over distance. The first release of the App Store has given us a preview of the many kinds of augmentation to which we can look forward.

EM Forster in his rooms

As friction in the user interface is reduced, and mobility and connectivity is improved; the augmentation layer becomes more transparent. When our vision isn’t clouded by the cumbersome interface of primitive machines, we can look up and see what the Network connects us to.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. 
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, 
And human love will be seen at its height. 
Live in fragments no longer. 
Only connect…

—E.M. Forster, Howards End

 

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@SteveGillmor : Plan B, and Playing ‘Dealer’ in Real Time

Published June 3, 2008 by cgerrish

Lightning

There are moments when a crucible unleashes both light and heat. In Michael Hiltzik’s book Dealers of Lightning there’s a description of a weekly meeting run by Bob Taylor at Xerox Parc’s Computer Science Lab in the 1970s. The meeting was just known as “Dealer.” The name was derived from the book about blackjack called  “Beat the Dealer,” by an MIT Math professor named Edmund O. Thorpe.

In casino blackjack the dealer plays against everyone at the table. In Taylor’s variant a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it from dissection by his peers. …The pitiless judgements dispensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught that an answer can be right or wrong, “one” or “zero,” but not anything in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half right, or had made a decent try.

The output of Xerox Parc and Bob Taylor’s meetings was nothing short of personal computing as we know it today. Every element of the graphic user interface, networking, social behavior over electronic communication media, the laptop, the Macintosh, object oriented programing, ethernet — found its origin in that fertile period.

I thought of ‘Dealer’ while listening to the Gillmor Gang talk to FriendFeed co-founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. The Gang was trying to teach Bret and Paul the old lesson that the street has its own uses for things. Feeding friends is one thing, but understanding that you have an opportunity to tap into a strong current of the zeitgeist is another.

You can listen to Dealer Live here:

To understand the show’s theme of Plan B, you sorta needed to be listening all along. The writing is a sound check of the ongoing jam session, the riffs are well established and the players all have distinctive sounds. It’s a textual interlude in the orchestral maneuvers of the fierce urgency of now.  If you have an “A,” it’s the “B” that creates the positive bid-to-cover ratio. The basic idea is that markets create the demand for common technical standards. And there’s an irresistible movement of the Network toward the real time flow of interactions. Real time interactions on the Network have had a limited scope. The “track” function in Twitter has opened a window to a powerful set of new interactions. “Track” works because Twitter is a primary market for gestures, but if @Ev, @Biz and @Jack don’t understand the lightning they’ve unleashed, those of us who’ve had a taste will need to consider Plan B.

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The Things We Use The Most Have The Worst User Interfaces

Published March 14, 2008 by cgerrish

One by one, Apple is taking on the lousy interfaces we have to deal with every day. The mobile telephone has had a terrible interface forever. When you’re selling the subscription to the pipe, the device is meaningless. The iPhone isn’t really a phone, and that’s the revolution in the device.

Cable television listings are impossible to search and the remote control is ill suited to the task. The economics are the same. The cable business isn’t about the user interface, it’s all about selling cable subscriptions. As long as it’s not an active negative, the method of finding, selecting and recording televisions will never improve.

There’s a revolution hidden in fixing television’s interface, because the new schema will include both hundreds of television channels, on-demand shows, music channels, and all the multiple media channels of the internet. We’ve become so used to working with terrible interfaces that we don’t even understand that something better is possible.

As with the iPhone, software will be the key. Cable television’s interface cannot iterate except in extreme circumstances. The software model is key to moving the interaction forward, and Apple seems to be the only company positioned to the HCI experiments at the edge into the mainstream.

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