Spirited Thought

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

One of the magical things about grassroots computing – grassroots anything probably – is that any success is decided by the participants. This basic rule is what ensures support but perplexes companies who want to make money from the productive application of technology. Users of technology do not overtly care about the monetary value of technology which is what makes it even harder – we are all quite content to use something we deem useful even if – and often even more if – we are delighted by it.

One of the challenges companies fall into is trying to create a community or an online social experience where there is no compelling groundswell. Online community development and certainly grassroots computing are not about technology, so building something rarely begets either.

Web 2.0-ifing existing applications is often a sure way to move further away from productive. The only time it helps is when the existing solution has a decidedly undesirable experience and the aspects of grassroots activity might result in better outcomes. Adding a set of widgets tells people you acknowledge and recognize the movement, designing or conceiving business with social computing as a core heartbeat tells people you are the movement. If you are successful, you did it right otherwise you learned a lot.

If the barrier to progress focuses on a framework articulating the values of the past or present, then the outcome will be one that follows instead of leads. There is plenty to be done meet the expectations of traditional returns on investment, but they will necessarily either limit innovation or shape the potential successes. To be really leading edge new measures and values are required that articulate the future state. Without this it is all smoke and mirrors.

Social software maps the networks we already know. Presumably, the goal is to have the systems we interact with enable or inform us about something or someone we do not.

Recently I have been beating a drum with a colleague on the lack of critical thinking people bring to bare, regardless of environment – digital or real – and how we might support more thoughtful interactions. The disturbing trend is that people communicate critique through disengagement and silence. Anyone who has enjoyed a college-level art class can affirm that the most humbling and beneficial moments come from open critiques.

Your work, something you sweat over for hours, is hanging up against a wall along side those of your peers. Artists hang their work on the wall, stand back and review in hopes to see what they might be missing. The things we like and dislike about art often thought to be subjective, that taste is something unique to us. If this were true then more people agree than disagree on esthetically pleasing artistic expression. Go to an art critique and watch as people judge both on the technical execution and on the way the piece makes them feel. For the artist, it is likely the first time anyone has interacted with them around their art; it is the beginning of a dialogue. When there is agreement, the artist has communicated something so well that everyone remarks. If the reaction is not in-line with the artist’s intention, then it is an opportunity to learn and adjust. Art is, at least in part, communication. For whatever reason, we do not ask our peers to hang Power Point slides up on the wall and reflect. Ask a developer to be honest about their anxiety of participating in a code review. We have created a culture of quite, passive, secret thoughts.

People need to be more critical. Not negative, critical. We have an opportunity every day to contribute to the reality we share, if even only to compliment. Why withhold so much in fear that we might offend? Try starting with what you liked and then follow up with your suggestion. Venture out and express how you feel the next time someone asks you for your thoughts. Do not just say, “looks good,” because that is the same as silence.

When you organize jour [sic] social world solely around affinity, then you get an endless hall of mirrors. - Adam Greenfield, Author, Adjunct Professor at New York University, from an interview with Zachary Jean Paradis, Sapient, interview.

Social spaces are about the participants and their connections. If they are unable to show us something other than what we know, they have failed. Collecting the list of people we know is an ego game, whose meaning is short lived. Part of addressing this challenge is in valuing the diversity among us – go beyond gender, race and include thought. Love the person who disagrees with you, because you have the opportunity to learn something new. Be more critical of what you see. Find others that are willing to be more critical of you. Decide that a hall of mirrors, while familiar, is not as interesting as what other people are showing.

Back in May, Adam Greenfield contributed a great article for Adobe’s Design Center Think Tank space called On the ground running: Lessons from experience design. He begins with an insightful – on hindsight obvious – observation that the distinctions between products and services is blurring. Adam introduces the roll of experience design as the agent helping blur these lines, highlighting three examples of XD gone awry: Nike+, Acela and Puma’s Trainaway. He ends with a resonating statement about conversations and not control, suggesting that while very often, tight experience design requires a greater level of control, but opening solutions up to user modification, the ultimate in end-user collaborative design.

While Adam’s examples illustrate his points well, there is another side of the conversation worth consideration. Obviously the three examples all result in some level of failure, which might lead to the conclusion that each was not worth doing. The thing about failure is that if the vision is grand enough, any action toward achieving that goal sets the stage for tomorrow’s experience. Nike+ (the iPod nano, Nike bio telemetric transponder shoes and the online data visualization) might not have been the hit people were hoping for – I actually did not know they lacked popularity – but the offering shows that someone over at Nike is thinking about how we reinvent the running shoe, a completely commoditized product with endless air pockets, gels and spring. Even if it fails, then notion that your shoes might have some electronics in them has come to pass in popular culture. It is no longer limited to the shock activated flashing LED. A recent post by Jonah Lehrer jokes about your iPod being made of biological flesh and yet continues on reviewing some research where scientists have shown circuits can be constructed out of biological material. It is all fantasy until someone tries to commercialize it and then the world gets to add it, flop or not, into the accepted realm of possibilities. This approach is probably not the best way to run a business, but its wonderful at winning the hearts and minds of people.

One of the areas Adam shines focus is the challenge in trying to control the end-to-end solution to deliver great experience design with a quote from Nokia’s Chris Heathcote. It might be the case that designing for one person is not practical; however, I also think we tend to try to make a single solution apply to too many. Narrowing the target audience may limit overall breadth of success, but it ensures at least one population is thrilled. For those early-adopters, runners and techi types, the Nike+ might have been a great geeky trip. Is this not just the long tail of XD?

Seth Godin posted on his obsession with improving alarm clocks, ending with the fact that products could be better if we tried to make them better. If the distinctions between products and services are blurring – a very sophisticated undertaking – then maybe the reason some have failed in the past has less to do with experience design and more to do with people agreeing its worth trying to make things better. As Adam explored, it only takes failure in any one of many things to challenge the overall experience.

By now, we have all been told the world is flat. If you missed it then, I am telling you the world got flat a while back and nothing will ever be the same. That spells opportunity for almost everyone and in areas that go beyond finding the lowest cost labor or outsourcing non-critical parts of the business. Quite literally, businesses are driving to be more than globally present, but integrated to act as one even if that one is made up of many.

There is a chapter that seems to be overlooked – leading and managing the globally distributed team. As far as I can tell, experts are rare. Conferences often have dozens of consultants that can help do it better, highlight common pitfalls, and yet will admit that everyone is still learning and many see it as an upfront cost of their future business. The mythical twenty-four hour workday is something requiring the highest precision and, from my own experience, exercises leadership muscles that draw upon core energy from intuition and values. Regardless, we are all experiencing a world where the focus is distributing talent often exemplified by the mobile worker, someone who is almost entirely self-sufficient without the traditional office space. Self-sufficient says nothing about productivity or impact. In fact, the mobile worker might save enough money for a business that less still ends up being more – the mobile worker gets less done, but costs less overall doing it. Reflecting in that light and there is nothing like setting out to fall short of remarkable.

This past week NPR ran a story on Jelly, a gathering of professionals working from a participant’s home letting people get the collaborative social aspects of a dynamic workplace without all the political overhead associated with the traditional workplace. Anyone is invited to Jelly and any profession goes – all you need is to remember that people are not gathering to hide in the corner alone, an open mind and suddenly you may have some of the creative and technical types missing from your day job. There is something utterly compelling about this approach to the workplace. No one makes it to the top alone and if your cats are your only collaborators, the mountain might grow faster than you climb.

As we distribute our work across the world, how do we Jelly? Without this level of exchange, we risk our creativity dying from the limited recirculation of thoughts. HP saw value in forcing a portion of their workforce back into the office. Innovation labs found in academia and industry tout the benefits of face-to-face interactions. Jellys could reach beyond the work-at-home’s working together to businesses looking to work better together if even far apart.

On the first of February, I accepted a new assignment managing an IBM innovation team – WebAhead. This new opportunity came as part of a reorganization where the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and WebAhead came under the same manager. My previous work, conceiving and co-founding TAP, is still with me and has become invaluable in understanding the challenges of inventing and innovating and having those outcomes impact the company broadly. Managing technology adoption or as some like to refer to it as technology diffusion is a key part of the mix – both are part of managing innovation, but a smaller part. In my case, I am managing the software development side of an innovation team – a group of developers that sit alongside systems administrators on a raised floor lab with an impressive amount of infrastructure and connectivity. What we work on, how we work on it, which people we collaborate with and when & how we deliver a given technology all determines the gait of innovation and our ability to transform the company – not just through new technology, but through leadership and cultural change. The creative outlook for this team is critical in its evolutionary output and certainly fundamental to its ability to invent completely new systems. Both the managing and creation of innovation is art.

As part of my drink from the information fire hose, I reviewed an article by Lars Erik Holmquist, “Inventing the future.” He presents the notion of predicting the future by inventing it (Alan Kay) and that one way might be to use user-driven innovation, where unlikely (extreme) users are engaged with new technology. (e.g. Find a group of fire fighters and show them a miniature wireless video camera intended for bank ATM monitoring) It is an interesting idea, a brainstorming technique that focuses on a group of like minded people that might think differently about a given technology. The seductive part is that it is an outside perspective that is irrefutably valid, because while they are engaged around the technology they are users of their ideas. Now, of course, this gave me some interesting thoughts around how we might approach some of our resources as define what we work on and how we innovate.

One of the key aspects of the Technology Adoption Program is helping identify, understand and interact with early-adopters, the users of early work. They tend to be a engaged and vocal group, willing to contribute in exchange for access to the latest stuff. Early data analysis confirms our ability to herd cats (early-adopters) and I wonder, what we might find if we repeated Holmquist’s user-driven innovation technique with segments of our early adopter community? This raises the flags of all the usability professionals, “do you even really know what kind of people make up your community?” The answer is sort of, but yes, I agree, we would need to do a deep dive on this. The second thought was, could we build a process and set of measurements around this technique to help articulate the value this method brings? Could we end up being able to compare its relative value to other methods of focused invention and innovation and then correlate when which technique provides the best output?

On any given day the lab is buzzing with the team understanding what it is we are building and the architecture and development that paves the way to get there. I am a believer in the idea that managing innovation is largely an art and in that way excited by the notion that we might create, discover and integrate other “paintbrushes.” While the brush does not make the painter, it can inspire and participate the creation of the painting and the development of the painter.

My introduction to Tufte was a gift back in 1999-2000 as we finished up the first version of IBM’s Next Generation Internet site. Mike Nelson, currently the Director of Internet Technology and Strategy, sent the team The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It was not until recently that I ordered two more Tufte works, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint and Envisioning Information. James inspired me to revisit these views on effective use of the high-bandwidth visual channel.

I read all the reviews on Amazon.com on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint before succumbing to the “add to cart” button. I figured for $7, if I learn one thing from the short essay, that it would be worth the purchase of what ended up something anyone who is already aware of the overused boiled down messages, bumper stickers for stupid people and irreverent use of cheap clipart trash knows. The value is in the thorough academic review and argument of what you might understand intuitively. It is either a validation of your current perspective or an enlightening read, because you are one of the world’s PowerPoint sinners.

Creating presentations is a necessary evil. I say evil because if we had enough time and a more literate workforce, we would have conversations and share papers. In fact, anyone who has given any number of presentations will tell you that it is all about the interaction in the room or on the call – otherwise it is just a one-way experience with limited value and increasing boredom. Yet, businesses and authors offer education on how to better deliver messages through presentation packages, regardless of their impact to ideas. There in lies the key to presenting – no amount of visual distraction or simplicity makes up for the lack of quality thinking. Fluff sounds like fluff even if it is animated.

One of my first internships was with VSI Communications Group in South Norwalk, CT an interactive production house (now called Mentor). These guys made their bread and butter on impactful communication presentations that companies were not capable of producing, but were willing to pay for. Every presentation had an art director, artists, content authors, project managers and developers looking to assemble and deliver a final self-running, cross-platform product in Macromedia Director. What made them successful was their ability to mix art, experience design and marketing to deliver a total package. If a handout was needed or a 3D animated exploratory walk through was required, it was all part of what the client was paying for.

I might be particularly sensitive to effective communication through some of my design background or general business knowledge. I have often thought of writing a book on the effective display of software architecture. An area that is often seen as a complicated series of boxes, arrows and notation that no one but the technical folks need to understand. If you have had the pleasure of being shown these types of diagrams, it usually takes at least one person or an additional thousand words of text to understand what is being depicted. I suggest this is an indicator that, regardless of standards we might adopt to represent architecture and software design, we need more focus on making these diagrams effective beyond our narrow target audience. If we can communicate our intentions to those who do not speak our language, then surely we will all understand what we are trying to do even better. There is nothing wrong with domain specific notation, but our impact is limited by our ability to translate it to those who do not understand us. If it takes special acumen to appreciate my message then I am almost literally talking to myself, something I would like to think is a rarity – after all I am not interested in thinking alone.

I just came across an article by John Biggs on the new Creative Zen Vision:M in the Circuits section of the New York Times. Creative’s new personal media player is positioned to compete with the Apple iPod, and it will undoubtedly fail.

Very often, businesses and people identify the best practices of the current time and employ them to better their position. In many occasions this is a prudent course of action. In Creative’s case it ensures that the Zen Vision:M will never be remarkable. Creative’s new offering looks like a copy cat with its rounded corners, large display and minimal controls. It is priced in the same range as an iPod. It plays various bits of media – more variety than an iPod. It offers a touch sensitive scroll bar as its primary navigation interface. Creative’s brightest minds can only hope that consumers are looking for an iPod alternative – maybe they can take some of Apple’s potential customer base.

As the new owner of a black video iPod, I might be biased, but I doubt it. I just finished up Donald Norman’s Emotional Design. Apple is all about their emotional brand and their emotional designs. A purchase with Apple grants access to the identity and mystique of what Apple and, in this case, the iPod have become to the modern world. What do white ear buds mean to you? What do you see when someone draws a rectangle with a circle in the lower half? Those who are not members wish they were or, at the very least, are curious as to what it might be like. For all we know, the Zen Vision:M and the iPod are manufactured by the same company and in the same factory in China, but no matter what Creative does, the emotional component of the personal music player remains with Apple.

The minimum rate of change required to nurture and fuel adoption is relative to the percentage of people adopting. Geoffrey Moore is well known for adding on to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory the idea that a chasm exists between early adopters and the early majority, where the early adopters often appreciate the benefits of new innovation regardless of its early faults and where the early majority often appreciate innovations that have demonstrated benefits and stability. The chasm is the biggest hurdle to overcome, but yields what is often thought of as the bandwagon effect, where adoption proliferates rapidly. Donald Norman discusses how things can be in vogue for a period of time (See Chapter 2, section: The Personality of Products in Emotional Design). More importantly, the leaders of society are not interested in acting like the majority – it is the differences that distinguish them.

Both Norman and Moore use the idea that the general population can be subdivided and that design or innovation needs to be directed to those different audiences. Early adopters are leaders in the adoption of innovation. When an innovation crosses the chasm and is adopted by the early majority, continued innovation re-engages the early adopters fueling the innovation’s brand within the community, easing the future transition of add-on innovation, solidifying continued adoption.

I was reading a post from Amit Gupta on Neopets, an online virtual pet site, and thought, brilliant! I remember a few news cycles growing up that positioned cartoons as a vehicle to sell products in toy stores. They engage viewers in thirty to sixty minutes of story and ads leaving them visually stimulated about, presumably, toys they have or want.

Over the last few years there was increasingly more attention placed on the use of product placement. It can be subtle, a view at a café might have a soda can one table over, but unrelated to the stars in view. Alternatively it can be the car that a main character is driving – vastly different in impact. People often bring their own filter into the movies, immersing their reality into the world of fantasy. When the star has a fantastic home in Miami or an exotic Italian sports car, viewers are also imaging themselves with those things. Viewers are both relating to the characters and exploring how the story presented fits with their own. This level of involvement is entirely within the viewer and the more engaging the movie, the more the product placement moves from a series of brand impressions to a “click through” of virtual use.

Nothing is more effective than actually getting a consumer to try a product at home or in whatever context makes sense. Marketing efforts often send out samples of products to target audiences to see what people think of their new thing. Often the receivers of the product can evaluate their general like or dislike immediately, and while the answers to the accompanying survey are important, it is the fact that all the participants have first hand experience with a product the did not buy, but could. The product is no longer in a movie where viewers are passively watching, it is in their hands, in their world. There in lays the buzz machine.

Neopets delivers all of the above. The first level of advertising is the virtual pet game itself. Like what you see on screen? Well, there are booster packs, magazines, plushies, t-shirts, jewelry and more – all Neopet inspired and branded. Amit points out that advertising is embedded as sponsored characters and mini games, extending the brands of many to the experience in a virtual world. Finally, participants are not simply viewers. Participants are interacting and experiencing how their virtual pet intermingles with the virtual world. All of this makes Neopets a compelling interactive experience that is as sticky as they come.

Images used in this post are Copyright 2000-2005 Neopets, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used With Permission.