N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)

The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”

N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)

For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.

Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.

In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.

There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.

Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?

Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.

What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.

I use an Eye-One Display 2 by GreytagMacbeth on my two Lenovo ThinkVision L201p displays driven by an NVIDIA Quadro4 980 XGL. Xrite, the owners of GreytagMacbeth recommend using two different video cards as not many dual-display cards allow different profiles to be applied independently. They rely upon the underlying operating system to automate the monitor selection and profile setting. Naturally, Microsoft has a utility that will allow you to apply a different color profile for each display attached to a given system. That is where their guidance stops.

If you have tried this yourself, one of the things you will notice is that simply setting the “primary display” setting on your display properties control panel doesn’t do the trick.

This will tell the i1Match software where the i1Display 2 device is, but from what I can tell, it continues to work with the other display’s color profile. At first, I thought it was enough to save the different profiles out with different names and then activate them with Microsoft’s Color Control Applet. Short answer, is that the two displays looked wildly different. Here is what I did to get it all working.

Calibrating two displays driven by the same video card with the i1Display 2

First, download the Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP (that’s what I run so maybe there is something else for other versions of Windows).

Second, calibrate you first monitor. I use the i1Match Software that came with my i1Display 2.

Third, save the profile with a name that will indicate which display it is for. For example, “Monitor_6-29-2009_Full_Left.icc”. This tells me not only the date, but how much of the calibration process I followed and for which monitor, in this case, the left one.

Fourth, swap your monitor cables. I know, so simple! Repeat steps 2 and 3.

Fifth, swap your monitor cables back.

Sixth, open up the Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet and assign the new color profiles to your displays. iMatch Software will have certainly screwed this part up, so remove all the profiles that are no longer relevant. Assigning a profile to a display is easy after you have “added” it to the possible selections.

At this point, your displays are calibrated. A simple verification test is opening a photograph and dragging it across the displays to notice any variations. This is what let me know there was a problem the first time, one was noticeably warmer than the other. After following the above, each represents the image the same way – let us hope faithfully!

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.

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 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.

Tufte drops some gems at the end of his video commentary:

To clarify add detail.

Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information they are failures of design.

If the information is in chaos don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Something he credits the iPhone for doing while critiquing that some applications leave the user in what I think of as a Jelly Bean Land. Things look great, smooth, glossy and colorful, just like the high polish of Jelly Bellys. In a wonderful call back to the ways of academics, Tufte pulls together some readily available visuals to illustrate his point – quite likely the work of his protégés. Messin’ with the iPhone is dangerous and exactly why someone needs to do it.

The two examples are the market view and the weather application. In short, each could offer higher data density, leveraging the characteristics of the high-res screen of the device, consistently reinforcing the uniqueness of the iPhone, not just relying on the improved touch screen, which will eventually be everywhere. However, people like Jelly Bellys and that is a tough argument. Many people like high fat, high-cholesterol, high sugar foods, but then are upset at their obese kids. Just because we like it, or that no one is complaining, is not a valid argument that it is right. In fact, there are plenty that agree, Tufte’s points are worthy, but his visuals leave too much and too little to the imagination.

His stock example is illustrated with a printed page (possible a portion of a printed page). The point is, see how much information could be displayed? Visually, it was awful. Everyone reveres the point, his text on sparklines and data density is biblical.

Lesson 1: When messin’ with the iPhone, offer visuals that are as esthetically pleasing as the ones in which you refer. It reduces the need to overcome the dissonance.

Tufte’s weather example actually draws upon lesson 1 (good job to whomever mocked up the improved weather experience). While not perfect, it demonstrates the added data density while maintaining some of the luscious visuals of the original weather experience. He adds a high-resolution weather animation below. It is a bit too large and reminds the viewer of low-def TV signals on a high-def, high-res TV. Conceptually fine, dangerously too real and hence offensive to those understanding it less as a direction and more as the solution.

Lesson 2: When messin’ with the iPhone, stay consistent in your accordance or violation with lesson 1. Again, it reduces the dissonance that the viewer has in understanding the presentation – consistency is highly explanatory.

Humans are fascinating creatures forming meaningful relationships with inanimate objects, often the ones that are soon perceived to be extensions of the self. Apple’s contribution to society is some of the best experience and industrial design ever, exactly what they are selling. Technically, it is all the same and yet they invest where people’s hearts are. A deeper reflection on Buddism and materialism reveals that there is no requirement to shed physically all material objects, but it is your ability to enjoy and simultaneously be indifferent of an object’s presence. Our appreciation for our present situation and detachment from it being so very necessary leaves a healthy mental balance. Many people will be buried with iPhones, but none of them will need them.

Last week I hopped over to B&H after work and picked up a GretagMacbeth, now xrite, i1Display2 monitor calibrator. I have been on the fence about color calibration – especially since to do it right requires a substantial investment. Monitor calibration is a first step to a commitment to color. If you have never experienced the difference of a color calibrated display you will be in for a treat. Once you are calibrated, you might think that the only pleasure you get is when you recalibrate, but as you work with images, you constantly remember that the color you see is consistent with what the color data in your files and that is amazingly satisfying.

Just after you calibrate you are sure to open up a recent photograph that you spent time adjusting – setting the white balance, highlight recovery and color – and you notice that what you have is markedly different than you remember. I was not disappointed by what I found, the shadows revealed richer transitions from light to dark and variations of color that were there but unseen. While I am not unhappy with the photo, it is different from my original intention, which is exactly why calibration is important. If you spend any time investing in the post processing of your photographs, then display calibration is the minimal investment required to avoid wasting your energy in getting things just right. Unfortunately, only color corrected systems get to see what I see, but that is okay because what you cannot see is your unknown problem. Web browsers are in general color limited, but when I make a print it will be closer to what I know to be true.

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.

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.