Spirited Thought

The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.

There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.

Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.

Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.

It is encouraging that people find analyzing data so compelling. Visualizations like the ones you can find at Digg labs can whet the appetite of almost anyone. Environments such as Many Eyes allow users to engage more directly in the dialogue of information exploration. Wordle, a tool that enables you to generate your own word clouds makes visual statements on views that go unnoticed.

Creating a Wordle visualization of your resume seems to be something people enjoy. It reflects back the author’s personal language for articulating their experience and qualifications. I wonder how many altered their documents to direct the impressions they were creating.

People seem to enjoy sharing word cloud views of the news and politics. Wordle generates beautiful pictures using word frequency; the more often a word occurs the larger it renders. This means that what you put in directly affects what Wordle can turn out. While it includes the flexibility of lower casing words, removing noise words and interactive editing if you spend any time with Wordle, you will find yourself tweaking your content.

In an attempt to practice my PHP skills, I created a simple utility to help automate some text processing prior to working with Wordle. Think of it as the presoak cycle of the word cloud creation process. While it is humble in its scope and function, it can heighten the impact of your visualization. Check out Wordle Presoak if this is the kind of thing you are in to.

This composition below presents variations using Wordle Presoak on the same text pulled this morning from Reuters, Palin says Obama friendly with terrorists. Notice how you can optionally maintain quotes and have them play with the words, perfect for telling a story.

What are your words saying?

The last few months have been a non-stop twister. While my monthly blog posts languished, I was busy scouting interesting flowers and insects in my backyard. Respecting the advice of those far better at macro photography, a couple months ago, I purchased a Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens. If you do your research, you will hear people saying to avoid this lens if you have not shot macro before. People comment on the amount of patience you need to capture a good shot. There are even people that revel in not cropping their photographs, which is a subtle way of highlighting how skilled they are. Pick up any decent book on macro photography and you will read about the special support systems and need for a tripod. Search the web and you will find people talking about hand holding compensating with a decent flash system. The MP-E is a manual lens and unlike a zoom where focus can stay constant the duration of the focal range, this lens is best focused by selecting the desired magnification and then moving back and forth until the desired subject and composition are struck. It is to say the least the biggest departure from common photography.

Macro photography is exciting. There is an endless cast of characters everywhere. You end up training your eye to notice the smallest of specks that might contain a different world. Hand held shooting at higher magnifications takes every ounce of concentration and muscle control. It is very much like small-bore rifle competition where the scopes are often high-power fixed magnification and the target is all of a dot. All of the movement a competitor sees is real, but exaggerated. All the same preparation and breathing techniques apply to macro photography – without them it is easy to see why this is a daunting venture.

I am not really an insect person. They do make for interesting subject matter. Insects are constructed so intricately and their behaviors and patterns are mesmerizing.  Shots with the MP-E are done under 5 inches and often around 1.5 inches. That means any fears, skittishness or intolerance of bug bites need to be overcome. It is in its own way therapy for a somewhat irrational worldview.

If you are looking for a meditative escape that changes your perspective and forces you to deal with yourself, Canon’s MP-E could be the answer.

Clicking on the image below will take you to a slideshow of my recent macro work. You will see my progression through my first four weeks and then two ventures outside my backyard in St. Lucia and Dayton, Ohio.

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.

Chris Chase, a neuropsychology professor back in college, enjoyed introducing concepts with the notion that humans are more alike than they are different. It is a useful foundation for deciding what is important to study, fundamentals that apply to everyone or the anomalies, certainly not unimportant, just narrow. And yet, humans are fascinated with differences and in particular our faces and our bodies.

Slavko Milekic, the chair of my undergraduate thesis on child friendly interfaces, evolved the face flipbook into kid-friendly touch-screen interfaces. Earlier on, in a self-study project I implemented the more traditional version of a face flipbook, allowing someone to switch parts of faces but in a more literal representation to the kid books I grew up with.

Reminder: There are too many examples of literal expression in virtual spaces that fail. It amazes me that we tend to not take on the larger challenges of inventing something new instead of replicating what we know.

Slavko introduced gesture and touch based interactions to the traditional computing environment enabling object switching, size shape and position. Certainly one of his successful creations was that of assembly of faces out of a variety of common objects like vegetables. Even at a young age, even when working with vegetables - something often seen as a challenge for children - we are fascinated with the construction of human form.

Move to the more taboo example of human nudity in art or even pornography. There are books dedicated to human genitals – again, the differences. Even when considering the world of fantasy and identity, nudity and pornography depict other people doing things that you yourself could do, by yourself, with others you know and increasingly others you do not know. So why that fascination, if not for the differences. What is it like to see an attractive someone with a certain set of features? It is all about the distinguishing marks, regardless of it being labeled art or smut.

My recent move back to New York City, more specifically Brooklyn, reminded me of the diversity I missed. A great Walt Whitman quote on a Barnes & Noble ad in my subway car read,

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

That must be what outgoing is, talking to the diversity around you instead of just observing. But, in fact, almost no one speaks to strangers – we even teach our children not to. However, everyone has the pleasure of enjoying diversity visually at fire hose volume in New York City and for me on my morning commute on the F train.

Professor Chase is still right, we are more alike than we are different and while we are consumed by those curious differences, I posit that our fascination exists because our distinguishing marks appear on a relatively common canvas.

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 first exposure to the world of 3D animation was the Luxo Jr. Movie shown in an Introduction to Computer Science Course lead by Lori Scarlatos now at Brooklyn College, CUNY. This past Monday (Jan. 2) I got the opportunity to check out the Pixar exhibit at the MoMA.

The amount of art – sketches, storyboards, colorscripts, and sculptures – was impressive. There were plenty of items that you might want prints of, all of it original and inspiring.

The idea of a colorscript is to visually communicate the color and often lighting of story, end-to-end. Colorscripts deliver visual emotional detail that informs the animation production. One of interest showed three rows of small monsters rendered in three different color palettes. Each color scheme represented a different part of the monsters you would find in different environments. For example, the blue and gray pallet represented the corporate characters. An interesting tie in here is the emotions that colors impart and connote. Thinking about Donald Norman’s work, Emotional Design, it would seem the proper use of consistent color potentially delivers more emotionally engaging work, even for your next PowerPoint presentation – making the visual part of a presentation be as informative as the speaker, appealing to different channels of perception.

There is also something to be said for the colorscript showing the whole story in small post card sized vignettes. I have seen many user experience and user interface presentations none of which show the entire application, end-to-end all at once. Often you see a rendering of sorts, often termed wireframes along side numerous annotations informing how the screen might be interacted with. What would happen if everyone had a copy of the entire application design on a 30” x 60” poster informing both the key views of the application, the position of relevant activity and interesting characteristics like color treatments, sounds and animation? There is something wonderful about having one effective record of a project that is seen in its entirety – the forest instead of the trees. It reminds me back to a previous posting on what happens when we limit our canvas and force only the necessary information to appear.

One of the interesting interpretations Pixar’s work was a 14 minute loop transitioning from the many irises of the characters. I took a small video clip of the projection to remind myself how we do not always know how something is going to be used, but if we do not create the work, it can never be used or (re)interpreted.

About two years ago I was recommended a book, The Art of Innovation, by Tom Kelley. It was my first introduction to IDEO, one of America’s foremost design firms.

Recently, while looking for follow-on IDEO work, I stumbled upon Thoughtless Acts? and I wanted it for the experience it might impart – it is not your average book.

At a street price of ~20 USD, there is probably no other like it. At first, it appears to be a hard cover book and then you notice how comfortable it is to open and hold – the spine is similar to tape binding, this one reminiscent of duct tape. It is hard to miss the die cut semi-circle in the cover. Regardless of which side of the book opened the reader is greeted with text in the right orientation. The book does away with all the extra pages (extra blanks, lengthy copyright, oversized ISBN barcodes etc.) – everything is designed.

The content of the book is presented in a series of photographs followed by some text explaining the intention of the book and an index with some concise descriptions of the images. There are seven sections organizing the photos: reacting, responding, co-opting, exploiting, adapting, conforming and signaling.

The intention of the images are to help the reader get out of their box and see everyday behavior as an opportunity for innovation. Every photo offers a social landscape for critical review of things we often discard as noise. The number of inspired questions and ideas that follow seem endless.

I started reading Donald Norman’s Emotional Design today. I have not read anything from him since college, so I thought this 2004 publication might give me a good refresher.

Norman is well known from his book, The Design of Everyday Things. I remember being intrigued by his thoughts on why we love or hate the objects in our lives. But, as Norman points out in his forward, if you made him your only master you had “functional but ugly” objects. The good news is that most people do not seem to adopt the mindset of a single individual, but instead remix the work of many others with personal experiences to construct a set of truths all their own.

More good news is that Norman has gone ahead and integrated a critical component of how people understand the world – emotion. As a side note, this reminds me about a different book I keep seeing at the local Barnes and Noble, Beyond Reason: Using emotions as you negotiate. People have an emotional filter, but often fail to acknowledge its presence – rationalizing facts hopefully justifying feelings. It will be interesting to see if Norman’s recent work offers me more than the obvious.

Creativity is a big deal to me. It is central to how my mind works. For me creativity is playful – there is no question that the kid in me is alive and well, it just so happens that the playgrounds change and I have discovered more of them.

I was musing on one of the author descriptions in The Big Moo – Hugh Macleod. Among other things Hugh spends his time drawing cartoons on the back of business cards. My first thought was, what an interesting use of limitation. Anyone who has taken a decent college level art class will known what I mean.

I remember back to the summer of 2003 when I entered the Rhode Island School of Design pre-college program. My focus was photography, but they expose you to a sample curriculum to help explore the possibilities. One of the best parts was looking at the illustration majors. Every piece of work was enormous, sometimes 5 x 7 feet. It impressed upon me that I did not have to feel confined by someone else’s notion of size – in this case the 19 x 24 Canson Bristol pad. So, Hugh’s decision to work with a smaller format evoked a similar inspiration.

The back of a business card is one of the best places to take notes about anything. It is small, so thoughts need to be crisp – a creative distillation process in of it. If I use my card and it is ever lost, I have a chance of actually getting it back.

What I love most about Hugh’s business card limitation is that is artificial. He can obviously render ideas and I bet has done so on larger pieces of media. It is a creative concept. What happens when we place artificial boundaries around our creative process? Does it help focus our ideas and expressions? Do we lose something that the RISD illustration majors are gaining? If we consciously impose a set of rules, do we need to pop back out to make sure those rules still apply and are helping and not hurting or is it the fact that we are conscious of imposing the rules that keeps us aware that we are not really limited?