kip/bot/blog

I’m becoming a big fan of criticism, at times enjoying how people write about other people’s work even more than consuming the work directly.

From today’s NY Times, a review of DJ Tiesto’s show in NYC, with some background description of what means this trance:

Virtually unchanged since the 1990s, trance is basically a gargantuan boom-chicka-boom with a steady kick-drum on every beat, and it’s supremely adaptable: euphoric, martial, perky, ominous, indefatigable. A trance D.J. set cycles through stark beats, pushy synthesizer lines, pop vocals and song remixes, and passages in which the beat drops away and synthesizer chords hover for a reverential moment, awaiting the next round of thumping propulsion.

I’m still uncomfortable at the rush to make everyone designers when we mostly understand design as styling, but Brown makes some great points and highlights things missing from many design thinking talks:

- design has been, and should be again, about big things

- design has its routes in system, systemic, or integrative thinking (it’s pulling together threads in addition to polishing the stone)

- design should start with humans.

The last I would amend on two fronts. First, design can start with technology (”what can I do with this nifty thing?”) so long as it gets grounded in human needs. I’m hoping Brown doesn’t mean it as an either/or but is overmessaging this part as a pendulum swing. Second, I might say instead that design should map back to human needs and be inspired by them. Starting with humans could force us into a habit of asking people what they want when they don’t know the possibilities.

It’s got a look (or maybe it’s the music):

We have the classic line from Picasso about artists being people who manage to hold on to their childhood curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment. We sometimes connect them to toys and play (MAKE Magazine has the “Permission to Play” t-shirt). This ignite talk takes us into the ________ world of adult Lego fans or __________.

I’m leaving those words blank, cuz I’m not sure this talk demonstrates the value of re-connecting with toys. The speaker doesn’t talk about sparking lateral thinking, improving brain age, the wonders of a refreshed and open mind, or the chance to create. He just really digs it, and he’s amused about the mania that comes with playing with Legos.

Still, he has a great line at the beginning, “the dark ages are the time between you stop playing with Legos as a child and decide as an adult that it’s OK to play with a kid’s toy again.” (One other great moment is when he’s having dinner with a woman from Lego and he describes all “these marketing people who keep asking (in a whiny voice)’aren’t you afraid it will hurt your brand? how do you control your brand?”

A more interesting, or more immediately useful, look at Legos come from the editor of Nuts & Volts and a class he teaches at Harvard Medical School.

The first 1:30 of the documentary Moog has a great line from Robert Moog, the inventor of the synthesizer and one of the parents of electronic music: “I can feel what’s going on inside of a piece of electronic equipment.” There are other passages in the movie (which has great tributes from electronic music performers such as Sun Ra, DJ Spooky, Mix Master Mike, Electric Skychurch and a wonderful animated title sequence), where he shows how visualizes the interactions of circuits and components. Interestingly, he also points out that his synthesizers are analog instruments, not digital ones and that he knows musicians approach the physicality of the electrical vibrations in the same way they approach violin, guitar, and piano strings.

Anyway, that close connection to material — which strikes me as a result of closely working and experimenting with them — as a source of inspiration, quality, and innovation is a theme near and dear to me. So, I clipped the movie and encourage would-be innovators and inventors to check it out. Moog the man is charming, engaged, lives a full life, and could be a more earth-bound person to learn from than Steve Jobs, Edison, and other lofty luminaries.

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PS One last reason to watch the movie is a Schaeffer beer commercial in which a 70s-mustachioed dude in polyester, riffs on the Moog for 20 seconds before the jingle (”Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.”) Worth the price of admission all by itself.

I’m taking a two hour class about bio-electricity where I also make a DIY ECG (electro-cardio-gram, the one for the heart). Signed up yesterday, and today, there’s a video of a guy (who’s headed to dental school soon, dunno why, but that seemed an interesting detail to add), who made a really simple one:

He has a funny bit at :45 where he mentions that he needed a capacitor to smooth out the current — when he was hooked up to the oscilliscope (one of his out put devices) he was picking up Spanish radio!

The blog entry is pretty fun as well. He has lots of fun extra detail.

or should be to a certain extent, if we take recently anointed Google numbers guru Hal Varian’s words to heart. The former economist (a very heavy maths-focused one at that) is frequently quoted as saying that statistician will be the next ’sexy’ job (just like engineer was), but the line, from McKinsey goes much deeper:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

I recently started working my way through Ben Fry’s Visualizing Data and adding Fry’s process to Varian’s shows some of the deep changes people need to make in order to embrace the new numeracy. Visualizing Data is more about Fry’s Processing language and how to hook it to datasets than it is about thinking visually or how to work through those datasets to find a pattern or evocative image, but it begins with a seven-step process:

ACQUIRE — Obtain the data, whether from a file on a disk or a source over a network.

PARSE — Provide some structure for the data’s meaning, and order it into categories.

FILTER — remove all but the data of interest.

MINE — Apply methods from statistics or data mining as a way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context.

REPRESENT — Choose a basic visual model, such as a bar graph, list, or tree.

REFINE — Improve the basic presentation to make it clearer and more visually engaging.

INTERACT — Add methods for manipulating the data or controlling what features are visible.

This does a nice job of highlighting that Varian’s charge is a mix of skills for managers, practitioners, and interpreters alike. Some of the steps are naive or described in a way that invites unhealthy simplisticism (simplicity == good, simplisticism, the thing we often get instead of simple is reductive, which is always bad). MINEing and REPRESENTing are the steps where numbers emerge into something living and actionable. MINE, as defined by Fry, is focused on software, rather than cognitive styles and elastic minds, for the generation of insights and pattern recognition. Certainly software is needed, but the hypotheses and candidate patterns you validate with the software come from soft eyes, something I blogged about a while ago. Similarly, REPRESENT is posed as choosing from a list of standard data tropes. But hey, it’s a software book and we all know Fry is more visual than that.

The real point is that this path shows a range of skills and validation even broader than what Varian points to. Someone working with someone working with data needs to know, understand, and respect the technical underpinnings of the first two steps, which set up the infrastructure of your entire data exercise. Like software, you need to measure twice, cut once here because this is the infrastructure of your inquiry and you won’t be able to change it quickly. Filter, mine, represent are subjects for another book perhaps, but they put you in the land of Tufte, Orwell, as well Flowing Data and statistics — a mix of simple communication, humanities, and the techniques of numbers.

The last one was also pretty interesting. I love how Fry reminds people to let the data grow with the audience by giving some interactivity. Sure, you do the first crack at it, but letting your audience go deeper, create their own juxtapositions, or simply play with the data gets them more engaged, allows for even more meaning to emerge from the data.

http://www.kipbot.com/blog/2008/03/05/dd-my-grad-school-footnote/

Psyche! I finally made it to Maker Faire and it was every bit as fun, interesting, and inspiring as I hoped. It was big and massive with welded giants of art and smashery. It was cool and witty with installations that made you laugh and wonder how the hell they did it. It was people-focused, having a large number of things that required no power or revived old skills (from vaudeville to composting to a lotta lotta Victoriana). Most of all, though, it was smart and, I hate to use the word, empowering. Everything had wit and intelligence and everything was comprehensible with a little help from the presenters, who were psyched to explain what they were doing.

My favorite, and I kept going back over and over again, were the soldering areas. Both the MAKERShed (MAKE Magazine’s store at the Faire) and Sparkfun (my favorite purveyor of fine electronic goods) had large tables set up with soldering stations where people could take the kits they had just bought and put them together with the help of staff.

These tables were never less than half full and it looked like there was always a mix of adults/kids, noobs/pros, male/female (though the females were predominantly adult). Sparkfun and Make both did a nice job of putting out projects that were doable, but not simplistic. Some kits let you solder two wires coming out of a battery pack to a thing that’s already running. While you learn to make a decent connection, and you’re not likely to fry any parts, you don’t really learn much and it’s not all that energizing. These kits, involved matching resistors, getting polarities right, and required some precision. I love the intensity on everyone’s faces.

The only disappointment is that there wasn’t much around renewable, social, or eco-preneurial. The DIY ethos was strong — make rather than buy, fix rather than replace — but it seemed like they could have dialed some of that up more, without being over-earnest or taking the fun out of it. Example: they had several playground toys designed by MAKErs. They were fun, looked cool, and had some interesting story to them — one was bicycle powered, one worked like a swing and was powered by leaning and leaning back. It would have been cool, given the theme, to see some of the playground toys that generate electricity or pump water.

Still, it was awesomely fun. I bought my second arduino kit and I’m converting space into a little work area and unpacking my soldering iron and box of switches, pots, leds, resistors, caps, transistors, etc and getting back to work. My first goal is to work with the Peggy:

It’s a board that allows you to address a 25*25 grid of multi-color LEDs. Loads of possibilities, especially if they’re connected and working in synch.

More pictures and vids and more to be added to a set on my flickrstream.

Flying out to MakerFaire in SF tomorrow and continue to be psyched, especially since they are focusing on renewable/sustainable America. But there’s a group trying create a Maker Faire in Africa — even more focused on social consequences and improvements from tinkering/making/experimenting ethos:

When discussions of wealth creation and poverty reduction are made in reference to the continent, for a variety of reasons manufacturing is left off the table. This is partly the fault of education and or orientation. Making fabrication the next “big thing” in a sense could go some way in changing these attitudes. Manufacture – literally, fabrication by hand – is exciting, and exists across the continent of Africa, and is abundant – from centers sited at dumps, where scrap metals are abundant, to more formal collections of mechanics and repairers who have set up shop in the urban core. Much of this curiosity, talent, and entrepreneurial spirit in manufacturing remains trapped in the informal sectors - bricoleurs and tinkerers who ingeniously meet hyper local demands and tend not to scale.

Many of the times when I’m writing about craft, I’m talking about being close to the work and its intricacies and materials. Last week, I started re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I last read, appropriately, in 1984 while I was in college. It was a perfect undergrad read: a salad of philosophy (complete with interwoven Platonic dialogues), personal wellness, a post-hippy balanced suspicion and enjoyment of technology, and a focus on the word/idea quality. (It was also my introduction to Chautauqua, a tradition which filled my mind for many years and was the name of a school paper I started my senior year.) The perfect summer after freshman year book.

This weekend, the NYTimes has a magazine piece about working with one’s hands, doing physical labor in an age of info-workers. The writer, Matthew Crawford, is a PhD, who once struggled to find work after rejecting the nomadic life of seeking tenure. When he got a gig, heading up a DC policy shop, he stayed long enough to buy tools and start his own, admittedly under-priced, one-man motorcycle repair business.

Both the book and the article seem to say things about craft, and they definitely both reference motorcycles, so a blog post that strings together quotes from each.

In Zen…, there is an early salvo about quality as the area of focus:

‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively results in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned to be concerned with the question “What is best?”, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answer tend to move the silt downstream.

I’m only 60 pages into the re-read, but I remember and feel that the rest of the book, which the author Robert Pirsig describes charmingly (and goofily) as a Chautauqua, is about how we comprehend and pursue quality in our lives. This gets into values, personal quirks and tastes, and most of all a cognitive approach to one’s life and its problems. This is where the Crawford article resonates.

[Motorcycle repair] frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

This passage seems romantic in its sense-based level of work and deeply satisfying. Crawford has a body of knowledge and experience that has translated into a finely tuned engagement of his senses. I picture him looking at the engine and considering one possibility with his mind, while reaching a hard to get to place and considering another possibility with his fingers while he samples the oil’s viscosity and a third possibility by the smell. In some cases, I imagine he can smell or hear the problem as a customer rides his motorcycle into the shop. If the problem lies deeper than his immediate senses, I picture him puzzling over the data, House-like, and testing theories in his head before testing them on the machine.

Earlier in the piece, Crawford talks about the intangibility of achievement in office life. Back in the 90s I split my time between database programming and writing union and political propaganda and position papers. The latter activity was where my heart was, while the former paid the bills and supported the first. But there were times when programming was the more, and more deeply, satisfying pursuit. Sure, I’d get excited when a speech I wrote came to a great crescendo or when I found just the right way to tee up an issue. But the computer work was oddly gratifying — figuring out a thorny bug, finding a better, more elegant way to work through a routine, handing someone a disk with compiled code that ran cleanly, running a program overnight and seeing that it had run flawlessly in the morning (this was in the x86 days). It felt great. I didn’t do it for too many years, but I did develop that extra-sense where I could just smell what the problem was. It felt great.

Not only was the work satisfying, it was mine. When I had written good code, I knew I had and there was no doubt. I could settle back and know the job was well done. When I was explaining my double lives of different satisfactions to friends, I remember being quite passionate about it. “When I finish a program, I know it works and I know it’s as fast as possible and can’t be written any tighter. So much better, sometimes, than writing a speech any idiot can say they don’t like. So much easier to prove that one line of code works better than the other whereas with a speech, someone, or I, will always be able to run the work down.” That last bit is part of the personal psychology in Zen… — finding the confidence to say this is good, this is quality and be content and move on. But the other satisfaction, of absolutely knowing seems connected to better sleep and better mornings and better breathing.

Crawford highlights an interesting dynamic around the intangibles of office work:

A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain . . . It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling.

When I was writing speeches, I was self-employed, so I took pleasure in putting out my own work to my clients. I might fail, lose the gig, have to go back for a costly re-write that robbed me of a weekend, but I remember liking the fact that it was my making and doing. But the self-protective double-think Crawford mentions seems like a loss to a person.

This is getting long and connected to more life-stuff than craft-stuff, but I sent this article to a former boss of mine, a man who’s very wealthy and had just started reading the article when I sent him the link. He wrote back:

I just spent the day on Saturday installing the lighting on our roof and when the day was done sat back in the waning daylight hours savoring the work sipping wine with a friend discussing that exact topic of “working with hands”.