Technology

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19
May 11

Treading water in the shallow end of social

It has been a few years since I was actively thinking about social software and the distance likely adds validity to some more recent observations. One of the simplest ways to integrate end-user facing technology is to aggregate information. The rise of the portal for good or bad encourages this concept of adding tiles on a grid enabling you to overwhelm yourself with information – intelligently or not. Visual aggregation as a method of integration is really an unacceptable place for social software to plateau. The most successful experiences create a context for multiple streams to come together. However, more could be done to integrate complimenting information and capability so that a new expression is created instead of a schizophrenic newspaper no one really wants to read or interact with.

Consider what you have seen in the social software landscape and ask yourself why the actor is almost always the sense maker. Why is it that there is an explosion of great social islands but a pathetic showing on how to leverage that information to create richer, contextual spaces? Most of the time solution designers attempt to create context employing a nicely designed banner and carefully selected color pallet. Unfortunately, the skin is only but a small element of context and while I believe that people are ultimately required to appreciate the meaning of a given confluence, we could do a better job surfacing interesting information and enabling interaction. One of the fatal flaws with traditional portals is the visual and physical boundary of information. There was a time when products enabled connecting one portlet to another, but failed to resolve that portlets do not inherently know how to collaborate with each other, a design activity outside of the technology. Unfortunately, some of our best examples of dynamic experience modification are also some of the most annoying commercial applications. You have to love the real-time markup of content where hovering over a word opens a thought bubble and video obscuring the content. Given a strong page framework and similar techniques integration could be this fluid and easily less irritating – a very simple example, abused, justly hated and hopefully soon to be abandoned.

Opportunities to do more have been around for years, and yet it feels as if the social technology landscape has just stalled. The best work is not even web bound, but device focused now. There is so much to do; I would think it would inspire people to push a little harder to realize the next revolution of user experience instead of hanging out in the kiddy pool all day.

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12
Nov 10

Software development is the newest blue collar trade

Traditionally computer science is a white color discipline, a cerebral activity beyond that of the typical trades. While not all computer scientists are software programmers, most of the things people touch on their computers and on the Internet run code that developers wrote. Developers may have worn white collars at one time, but are now more than ever better served if we dress them in blue.

Understanding what makes great software developers needs to become a top imperative or everyone’s desire to successfully leverage the developing economies of the globe will result in the next decade of disastrous implementation. We will all literally be digging out of the worst collection of computer code the world has ever seen. This is not to say programmers in developing countries are not capable of creating great code – clearly that would be too broad a generalization. What I am saying is that there is a core set of existing developers – waves one through five – that have created the software and network conscious of the world. That experience and knowledge is not easily portable locally or internationally. More needs to be done to consider the ways in which we grow developers. The fact that everyone is quick to move to emerging markets is simply exacerbating the fact that the Western world contains much of the building blocks everyone takes for granted.

There are classes of programmers that have never written the basic code to connect a web application to a database. They use any number of indirect frameworks to achieve what is a relatively straight forward activity. It may be laborious, but it also results in a development team that understands what is happening at every moment in the system. Delegate to someone else and your risk is that whatever was to be done is performed less well than if you performed the task yourself. There are plenty that will tell you it is a given since it’s the only way to scale yourself as a person. When we are talking about computer code the exposure is as great as the worst written code. Perfection is not required, but ignorance is worse.

I recently got passed the essay Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford and with a little positioning should be the playbook for America’s future – possibly, eventually, the world. Crawford does a delightful job exploring what it means to be engaged in a trade – its scarcity, importance and value.

My recent gap in blog posts reflects that my life got too busy to support the usual post – selling a house, buying a house, moving and building out a studio to compliment the changing lifestyle. I share this because it is likely the first time I took on the challenge of building something by hand that I would usually create with money. There is no shortage of cerebral activity in building and Shop Class as Soulcraft makes this point well. It is easy to liken it to software programming in that you need to understand fundamental principles – logic, algorithms, design patterns etc. This is not much different than a builder understanding material strength, stability and appropriate use. Programmers feel the same pride and satisfaction from code well-built as a trade person elegantly executing their craft. While there is a notion of mentorship and hierarchy the trades have a more structured concept around apprenticeship. This is a critical aspect acknowledging that some of the knowledge to be had is hard if not impossible to distil or consume in traditional forms. Experience efficiently encodes more information that our conscious mind processes, yet our beings embody the knowledge.

There is no shortage of computer programmers in the world, yet there is a dearth of individual and shared development experiences. We can’t expect everyone to live through the trials of personal computers or the Internet, but we do need to bridge the gap or not only will we repeat history, but we won’t have enough people to fix it all when it is broken. No different, Crawford points out that with the dwindling ranks in the trades the individual that understands how to do something with their minds and hands will become the most important person in the village. While I clearly agree for the need to embrace the world’s crafts, I believe we are facing an epidemic that must be reversed. Just as the established markets have created a pile of stinking code, failing to pass knowledge to newer generations, we extend the work to nations that have even less shared knowledge. We must apply the methods of the trades to software development or fail faster before the shared knowledge ceases to exist.

I will wear a blue collar any day since it transcends what use to imply class and embodies a healthier balance of being. Read Shop Class as Soulcraft and figure out how to help fix us before we are broken.

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25
Oct 09

The state of the art is falling short of dreams

Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y.  11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.

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

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)

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.

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29
Aug 09

The pen to paper transformation

The physical practice of writing, drawing and doodling is at the heart of constructing high-bandwidth content for low-bandwidth fluid consumption. Yet, there are few people that actually practice these methods. Of those that do, the technology mediated construction of content vaporizes the artifacts associated with the experience. People still benefit from keeping a digital diary, but all the edits typical of pen are erased to leave a final pristine form.

Simplicity is often thought of as minimalism, however there are plenty of complicated things that appear simple – look into biomimicry for examples and inspiration. Simplicity is possible with more thoughtful design. Being thoughtful requires clear understanding of evolving thinking – a reason people love to study the work of others to help define their own.

Zack Arias has become a wonderful source of thoughtful content. Recently he posted a photograph of his whiteboard where he was thinking through the end-to-end experience that his clients have when working with him. It conveys an enormous amount of information that clearly transpired of a much longer period. The final product is something the viewer has the honor of appreciating, while Zack had the hard work adding and editing the realities of his business and priorities. Zack gets the transformation in how he thinks about his business, while the viewer simply gets to peer onto the artifact.

Dr. Michael Wesch has been working with the LiveScribe SmartPen which records the audio and markings of the author in digital form. It can then be explored and shared in video progression with others. The author gets additional benefit being able to play audio associated with any note by tapping. What is wonderful is that Dr. Wesch is also sharing how he filters, structures notes and draws relationships with his content, all in the context of the presentations of his students. This is an improvement over the whiteboard where the viewer is regulated to one state of a product. While a lot can be teased out with Wesch’s smart pen experiment, we do not in fact understand what he is thinking. We do not know his transformation.

A sample of what the Behance Action Pad looks like.

A sample of what the action pad looks like.

Behance is a company that creates products and services that help provide order to what can seem like creative madness. In fact, they help bring simplicity – clarity – to the numerous aspects of thinking. They break things down into preparation, actions steps, back-burner thoughts and unlined but dotted work spaced that facilitate diagrams and writing the same. This is an example of encoding a structure to help replicate behavior. It comes from patterning after a methodology that mediates the structuring of creative thinking. As a tool, this method and its papers facilitate – we hope – more clarity and hopefully more simplicity. Again, there is no way to capture someone’s transformation, except possibly in his or her progression through the framework.

Now, if only more people took a pen to paper to write, draw or doodle. There is no shortage of content creation, but we lack the records of the experience. We snap endless photographs and videos to simply flood and archive the world. People love to say it is the journey and not the destination. What if there is no destination and not enough people are journeying?

Consider the complexities in your art or business. What are your most complex challenges? Can you gauge from your work products how evolved your thinking is? What we present is a direct representation of how clearly we think and evolved our thoughts are. Yet, the majority of examples of slides and diagrams show the garbage dump yet to be wade through. When was the last time you saw a white paper? When was the last time you read one? There is a class of people that know, writing anything at all puts you in a position of leadership. There is another class that actually reads it and sees the mess. The only way to come to deep understanding is to work though it, be it with a whiteboard, a SmartPen or Behance pad, and allow the transformation to occur with your thinking. It can be done digitally, but there is something more impactful in picking up a pen and placing it to paper, that captures the evolution as you think that represents to the author the journey and to all others, the result.

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20
Jul 09

Obsessing on color: Getting i1Display to calibrate dual-display video

Color calibration is one of those things that you buy relatively expensive gadgets to asses and correct deviations in visual displays. If you care about your digital imaging process, calibration is critical – buying the gadgets that help simply provide a piece of mind that what you see is as close to what it should be as possible. Add an extra display, as I did, and suddenly you are thrown into the depths of color correction. You never knew how different displays could be.

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.

Microsoft Windows XP Display Properties

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.

Microsoft Color Control Applet

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!

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