kip/bot/blog

Interesting Microsoft move pre-reported by TechCrunch this morning:  Bill Gates will announce (or has announced) that (verified) students will have access to MSFT development tools for free.  In a program called Dreamspark, students can get the entire Visual Studio line, Expression, Windows Server, and Game Studio.  It’s a smart way to compete with open source, build the community of developers who work with and prefer Windows, and build brand loyalty at a formative phase of someone’s career.

Channel 8 did an interview with Bill Gates about this initiative which turned into talking about software.  Despite outsourcing and the commoditization of certain development skills, Gates is still quite bullish on the importance of programming:

[People can use MSFT dev tools to] build a career around or build fun software for themselves.

The skill of design, skill of knowing what good code looks like … will be around for the next couple decades.
There’s nothing more fun than thinking about software . . . software for the poor (there’s a lot more work that needs to be done), software to make jobs more interesting, software to help peofle design things in new ways … if you think about the sciences today they’re really driven by software … biology has so much information that it’s really software people who are gong to help find patterns and organize that information.

Anyone who has spent time with Intel employees knows that Andy Grove’s influence on the culture there was deep and long-lasting. From conversations during my time with them as an agency person, I picked up two presentation edicts that traced back to Grove: 1) no laser pointers (apparently Grove can’t stand the sparkly diffusion when they hit a projector screen); and 2) ‘only show 4 “foils” per hour’ during presentations (”foils” refers to slides and the techniques for making them when the Grove culture was at its peak).

I love the 4 foils per hour rule. It’s Presentation Zen’s rule of “go broad or go deep” gone crazy wild Xtreme. It’s like turning it into go broad, go deep, or go metamega-deep. Imagine having a concept and/or graphic rich enough to warrant 15 minutes of conversation? What kind of mind-changing and engagement happens then? I realize that Intel is an engineering culture, so opportunities for these kinds of slides are more frequent there than in other environments. But consider Tim OReilly’s Web 2.0 slides from a few years ago:

They’re ugly and contestable to be sure. But these slides are deep and systemic and still useful. Whether you disagree or agree with some or all of it, you’re going to be smarter for wrestling with or, better yet, trying to improve them. Another slide from NextD describes different types of innovators:

Look at all the nifty things going on here: four types of people, who can be grouped in to two higher-level types, and who reach out into different areas in different proportions and who may or may not map to a company’s process. By arguing about the accuracy, relationship, edges and arrow directions for 15 minutes, you get much deeper into innovative cultures, management styles, and process than you might with a dozen slides. (Also, by discussing something for 15 minutes and digging into its richness, you have something more memorable, better internalized, more grokked by your audience. That is, of course, assuming you and your slide are able to command attention for that long.)

And you don’t necessarily have to do info-graphics, either. Take a look at a screenshot from Flickr this morning:

This is a sampling of Holga groups, people dedicated to photography with a cheap camera whose artistically flawed lens creates sometimes eerie, sometimes sentimental, always distinctive effects. From looking at this slide, you can talk about long tail, community, community-bulding and marketing, the redefinition of amateur and professional, co-creation of brands (Holga effects found their way into Photoshop filters), and help your audience go beyond the lame, puddle deep Business Week understanding of the photo-sharing, community, 2.0 phenomena within it.
So what would happen if we had a rule in design and marketing presentations: don’t show any slide that doesn’t warrant at least 5, 10, or 15(gasp!) minutes of explication and conversation. (Or, as a compromise or improvement: Don’t do a presentation that doesn’t contain at least one over-arching slide that warrants 10 minutes of explication and conversation.)

What it might do is force us to think deeply about our models, concepts or ideas and make sure that they are rich enough to warrant a conversation. It might move us beyond some of the label-making and phrase-coining that seems to drive so many presentations. By looking at a rich slide in detail and for an extended period of time, we’re forcing ourselves into systemic thinking which may, at the end of the day, be more persuasive.
That said, I also enjoy big pictures with three words in a brightly colored band as a way of grabbing attention and registering something emotionally. They’re appropriate for motivational and sales talks, talks in which you’re trying to reinvigorate principles or ideas which are familiar, telling a story, or for very short (especially funny) presentations.
Designers in the interactive space are caught in between two powerful forces when it comes to presentations. One the one hand, we adore Tufte, who in addition to teaching us to loathe chartjunk also teaches us appreciate and promote information density and richness of thought. On the other hand, we’re moving towards a narrative-driven, flip-book style of presentation that illustrates nearly every sentence with a visual. We need both, but might be forgetting how to do the richer, deeper slide.

The people at MAKE Magazine and OReilly love to quote Robert Heinlein’s line that “specialization is for insects.” Being a generalist is very important, even trendy, these days.

However, when IDEO and other companies talk about T-shaped people, there’s a tendency to focus on the thick, generalist bar at the top, while overlooking the specialty represented by the base. While this kind of pendulum swing is natural — one point of the observation was to get us out our waterfall specialty-oriented processes — it’s important not to lose sight of the importance of superbly practiced craft.

Lumiere and Company is a project where prominent directors and cinematographers were given models of the original Lumiere Bros. movie camera and 3 rolls of film. Participants were asked to shoot a film under the following conditions: 1) no editing, 2) no synchronized sound; 3) you have only 3 rolls to get it right. (Most directors did a straight shot of 52 seconds — the length of the roll — but a few turned the camera on and off to tell their stories.))

There are lots of really good ideas and approaches to this: David Lynch tells a small town murder story with cool light effects as transition, one cinematographer shoots water fountains to create a brilliant sepia animation. But my favorite is a very meta film by Francis Girod.

(extra space since a spoiler is below - so now’s a good time to watch it. sound helps)

The short summary: a man and woman approach each other, dance-like and seductive, with the famous Act I aria intro from Carmen (�?L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle�?). The woman swoons/faints/melts at the moment of embrace. The first take is clunky and the actors work out their moves. The second take works out some technical issues, shows improvement, and the third take is spot on.

I just love how meta it is — they had three rolls of film to shoot a scene of three takes, and the progression of the acting looks a bit like the progression of how actors learned to translate their skills from the stage to the big screen. Most important, though, it shows the importance of that last 20% of a craft. There aren’t many obvious differences between takes one and two and three, but the third take is electric. (And how cool is it that these actors could move through three different levels of quality within the one take?)

Creative shops always face the challenge of how much specialty talent they need. It’s not uncommon to see boutiques have the guy with the English accent or the woman who smokes do voice-overs, in the interest of speed or cost. Little to no harm done, it gets you to a good, solid, 80%, B-B+, performance. But at some points, with certain clients or at certain times in a company’s path, you need As and A+s.

Both parts of the T are important . . . and learning how to manage and leverage specialties and generalist approaches is a new management challenge for us all.

Roberto and Lizette Greco are plush toy designers (among other things) who designed a plush mascot for a ‘one laptop per child’ campaign’ (Un Computador por Nino, or UNPC) in Chile. The mascot is pretty cute, and UNPC even has a youTube group.

UNPC does not officially support or promote the XO, they are simply lobbying for one laptop per child as an educational initiative. So Pudu, the mascot, is carrying a less distinctive laptop.

They have a flickrstream about their children’s experience with the XO (the first pic does an evaluation of all the software they’ve installed)

They also highlighted two other piece of educational software: Squeakland, which is the inspiration for eToys; and Scratch, a programming language which looks like an interactive game/environment language. Scratch looked pretty complicated to me, but the Grecos say their kids (aged 7 and used really took to it:

Published a few years ago, Leonardo’s Laptop was a disappointing book. The premise was exciting: how would we conceive computing and the internet if Leonardo were using a laptop, like he used his notebooks?

But the book largely broke down into a discussion of usability and how technology could transform medicine, the arts, engineering, politics. That said, there are some good, Powerpoint-worthy(!), lines from the author and the people he quotes.

I feel … an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may … reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings. — Thomas Jefferson

A fuchsia cell phone might be pretty. But a cell phone that does not require a manual — now that is beauty. – Katrina Galway, Letter to the Editor, Time Magazine

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. — George Lois

JJ Abrams, in his TEDTalk, has some great lines about tools and inspiration.  He relates the importance of his Super 8 camera when he was 10, a synthesizer when we was 14 (he composed the theme to Alias), and he has a great line about his Powerbook:

mystery is the catalyst to imagination

technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me, that blank page is a magic box

the Powerbook challenges me, it says ‘what are you gonna write worthy of me?’

I’m blogging about the XO because it feels like most interactive professionals are rushing to judgement (positive and negative) and missing an opportunity to dig into a rich design case study.

When I say “most interactive professionals”, I’m referring to the voices I’ve come across on blogs, twitter, and some searches. It’s not a scientific sample, by any means. However, the rush to harsh judgement, and the lack of any real in-depth looks, makes me suspicious. In our daily work, we spend hours and hours watching users look at slightly varying shades of color, or small pixel level adjustments to improve the performance of a page by .5%. We spend hours and hours speculating about what features the next OSX release might have, and then many more hours evaluating them. But, for the XO, it seems like we have it all worked out in 20 minutes or from the press coverage.

I wish there were people out there who were explicitly evaluating the XO against: 1) the educational approach driving the project; and 2) research addressing how kids approach computers for the first time.
The first point refers to constructivism, an educational theory which can be summarized crudely (to the point of coarse vulgarity) as kids grow cognitively by doing things rather than simply being taught. There’s too much to cover in a blog post, but even Papert’s summary is better than nothing:

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education… From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as [the construction of] a meaningful product. [italics mine]

The constructivist point of an XO, and there are other points (such as providing digital textbooks via the internet), is to get kids building and making things with a computer. I haven’t dug deep into the literature, but there are some places that look at the tools underlying this approach and how well they work: Life-Long Kindergarten, the Maine Laptop Initiative, and the robotics-in-school wave sparked by LEGO’s Mindstorms. Experiments like this are, by nature, hard to conduct. The lab is usually restricted to a single classroom, maybe a school district, or, at best, one state. I would love to hear designers and others talk about this.

(Interesting) sidenote: an individual’s early experience with computers seems to be a strong factor in whether people are inclined to like or put the hate on XO. As a kid, I took an 8th grade programming course on a TRS-80 and it created a lifelong fascination with math, science, generative design, computation, digital creativity. When I was eight or nine, I played with a lunar lander program (your craft is falling to earth and you can use direct or rotational thrust to land safely). It was a painfully slow computer (a phone handset was placed in large rubber holders to talk to the mainframe at CMU), but I spent an entire afternoon plugging numbers in, waiting three minutes for a response, recording the results, and backing into the rules driving the game (to say I was backing into the math would be an exaggeration, it wasn’t as formal as that). I was, in effect, “reverse engineering” and learning a complex system.

Slightly younger friends of mine had Commodore 64s with Turtle Art (the epitome of a constructivist software app, shown below) as kids. They also seem to be predisposed to liking the XO. For all of us, there is a sense that these constructivist moments were as valuable in forming our clearly fabulous minds and inspiring us to learn as any formal schooling we had.

Understanding, and actually looking at, the constructivist underpinnings and implementation of the XO seems to be missing from most design discussions of the tool.

The second point, how kids approach computers especially when they are largely undirected, is another area where I think western designers are missing an opportunity (or being sloppy). We’re all very well versed in how comparatively affluent consumers approach websites and other interactive experiences. We also have an idea of how supervised kids approach the web, but do we know anything about how kids learn them for the first time and alone? When we “laugh our asses” off at the operating system, what is it based on? How do we know that the OS is inappropriate?

Again, I don’t personally have a lot of data points, but one project that is repeatedly referenced is the Hole in the Wall, a program where unattended computers are made available to kids in India. From PBS:

From the slums of New Delhi to the coastal roads of Banda, hundreds of poor kids in India go online every day at free, outdoor computer kiosks installed in slums and rural villages to read news headlines, befriend cartoon figures, draw with digital paintbrushes and explore the possibilities of cyberspace.

There are no manuals, no adults to guide the kids, and it’s a Windows machine (originally an English version). The kids (who appear to skew older than the OLPC target by three years), teach it to themselves and each other.

There are a lot of design challenges against new assumptions in the XO, so the question for me is: why aren’t designers trying to learn from the XO or at least do a more informed critique of its design?

Fun set of comments attached to a blog post about Stephen Kosslyn’s psychological tips for Presentations highlights the tension around number-crunching and expertise.

For those that missed the twitter, there are some cog-sci principles reduced to four memorable (or at least re-memberable) principles: 1) Goldilocks — show the amount of information that is “just right”; 2) Rudolph — like the red nose, guide the user to the most salient point; 3) Rule of Four — people have cognitive difficulties dealing with more than four visual ideas; 4) Birds of a Feather — group similar things to smooth out the narrative. (This is 3rd or 4th hand, TED had something about it as did other blogs and this one.)

These are grounded in cog science and describe the kinds of things that are “brain compliant”. What’s funny, though, is the reaction of some designers:

So, wait….cognitive science is just figuring this stuff out? These are the sorts of things graphic designers and advertising students learn as freshmen.

I learned this stuff when I took graphic design, especially in typography class.

I don’t know this is kind of common sense. If you need a cognitive scientist to tell you to change a couple colors or stray from having 20 things on screen then I doubt you have anything worth bringing to a presentation.

Amen. Tufte explained much of this 6 years ago. Kosslyn does add valuable insight and data. PowerPoint keeps evolving. Presenters keep devolving.

Yeah this Design 101 (hello, hierarchy of information!), tarted up in science drag.

Nice implementation, if you will, of a vacuum cleaner bag. My last vacuum, which I loved (major power!), had perfectly square bags, with perfectly square cardboard around a perfectly round rubber seal. Even when I tried to remember how I removed the previous bag, it was trial and error getting the new bag in — lots of rips and misalignments. No mistakes possible with my new Miele, though! It has a guide, and matching arrows on the bag and the guide and no need to mess with the seal . . . the guide puts it in place for you.

I’m a fan of the XO — the project, the goal, the educational ideas behind it. More than that, I’m fascinated by it.

I have a hard time thinking of what mass-market product has been launched since the PC that is more complex. And I don’t think there’s ever been a product launch as transparent as the XO’s. What a case study: a revolutionary piece of hardware, innovative open source software, designed for a market that may or may not welcome it and an incredibly broad audience.

I’ve got a Flickr photostream, with a bunch of screenshots, but wanted to capture some thoughts on the blog.

First, the project is enormous:

- $100 laptop (it’s now $200, and OLPC hopes to get it to $150)

- for children aged 6 - 12. I think this is the biggest challenge. This age range covers pre-literate kids up through pre-teens, playing simple games through programming.

- Integrated into school curriculum, appealing to government agencies

- be a substitute for textbooks (the swivel screen and glare-proof monitor support its use as a Kindle-like device. Textbooks are scarce in the US, and almost completely non-existent or out-of-date to the point of useless in many of the XO’s target markets.)

- EXPRESSIVE - stimulate the imagination (art, computation, narrative)

- APPROPRIATE - sturdy, stable, long battery life, outdoor use, theft-deterrence

- OPEN - the OS and software must be easy to develop, easy to adapt/upgrade, NOT dependent on another company’s development cycle or staff

Designing something for kids aged 6 - 12 is a massive challenge in and of itself. This challenge manifests itself immediately and viscerally in the keyboard:

(Click for larger image and comments on flickr.)

A snap, but fair, judgement to make is that boy, there sure are a lot of keys: quick keys, amplifier keys (CTRL, FN, etc.), the keyboard itself. To make matters trickier, some of the keys have three values assigned to them. Finally, there’s an inactive slider bar on the top and two types of input devices at the bottom (the middle is capacitive, the outer two resistive). So did they get it wrong? Is it, to quote one designer “a shining testament to the disastrous effects of theory-driven- and designer-driven-design”? Let’s look at what the keyboard needs to do:

- be useful to a 12 year old, who will word process, browse the web, play games, draw, and hopefullly program

- support languages with complex character systems and constructions (more than the US qwerty)

- provide quick key, shortcut usage that power-users expect (unless we think 3W kids can’t be power users)

So is the keyboard poorly designed? If so, is it cuz it’s theory-driven or because it strives to do too much? It still comes back to the age range 6 - 12 year olds. In the states, we can buy our kids different electronic devices at different ages, and the market is awash with chip-driven educational/entertainment devices. But this one has to do it all.

The second big design moment that peole confront in the first minutes with the device is the home screen.

This takes a few minutes to figure out … at least for all my interactive friends. The black border area is hidden from the user’s view, until the cursor is move to any of the four corners — it’s like Expose on OSX. The top black band contains quick links to system things like the network, or the home page, the bottom band contains links to all the applications on the machine. The left and right bands, and I like this, is a clipboard area. Anything the user adds to the clipboard is available here. That’s means a user can collect text, sounds, drawings, photos (from the camera) and have them available in eToyz, an authoring program on XO that has a lot of resemblance to HyperCard of old.

This is a busy home page, after the user has opened several applications. (Notice that the black border is missing, when the cursor is moved out of the corners the full screen is restored.) The ring contains all of the open applications in the form of graphic links, and right clicking allows the user to close the app without having to switch to it. What I love about this part of the interface is the way in which it graphically represents a machine whose RAM is full. Rather than a system resources message, the young user can see that things are pretty crowded and that they might need to balance/fix the situation.

There have been some questions around whether the XO should have a cheap version of Windows. As noted above, there was an early decision to go open-source. Part of the reason for open source is cost — there’s a lot of software and talent that can be leveraged with a Linux system. The other reason is that, with Linux, it’s possible to create a light-weight, clean interface like the one above.