kip/bot/blog

David Simon was guest celebrity for the “Not my job” portion of the 16-April-2011 “Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!” Peter Sagall asked why he provides so little explanation of new terms or highlighting of subtle plot twists, and there was a great exchange that hits some nice notes about simplicity, simplicticism, complexity and richness (around 18:00):

Peter Sagall: “One of the things about the Wire … is that you don’t do a lot to help your audience understand what’s going on. I remember when I first started watching The Wire the plot was complicated, there was language that I didn’t understand. I mean, is that intentional, are you like ‘you just got to pick it up?’”

David Simon: “For me, this is going to sound haughty and I don’t mean it to, to me when everything is explained when everything is right there on the surface, I find myself leaning back and becoming disinterested. And I think it’s much more interesting to tell a story when you have people leaning towards the television screen trying to think about it.”

Simplicity isn’t engaging, complexity is. Complication sucks, so does being simplistic.

This is fantastic. Bill Evans talks about the importance of quality and accuracy in musical invention. In this four minute clip, Evans illustrates one point: doing a specific thing well is the key to great creativity, doing a broad thing vaguely OK isn’t close. He points to mediocre art coming from people who “would rather approximate the entire problem than take a small part of it & be real & true about it,” arguing that it’s “better to do something simple which is real . . . it’s something you can build on, because you know what you’re doing . . . whereas if you try to approximate something which is very advanced and you don’t know what you’re doing”

Then, amazingly, through several improvisations on top of “I like New York in June,” he illustrates a specific, focused approach that moves as well as a general approximation approach.

(Interestingly, I have for many years, been a fan of Oscar Peterson and wondered why people like Miles Davis hated him so much. That sample at 1:30 just deepened my understanding of this. Wow.)

Two articles come to me today, reminding us that recruiting and hiring is only half (maybe less) of the equation. You need to cultivate talent to win, and A teams often have deep roots with each other and the culture. The first piece is from the Today show of all places and I have no idea why my friend @jpfrenza was there, but he tweeted this piece. It’s a look at where players from the four championship football teams come from — and half of them were drafted (meaning hired right out of college and cultivated, developed, invested in, and trained) as opposed to being traded.

This is hardly scientific (there are no comparisons to the losing teams), there are notable counter-examples (the Yankees, for one), and there’s no apparent cause. When @jpfrenza tweeted it, he teed it up as a choice of stealing or growing talent. The author of the article posited that loyalty is what you get out of a draft. There’s also the possibility that teamwork counts for something. (That sheds a light on the Yankee example. They’re pretty successful buying their way into pennant and championship races, but baseball requires less on-field team work than football – maybe.) Unproven, but interesting nevertheless.

But this morning, a news alert at work points me to a Business Week interview with Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP:

When we buy a company, we always think of it as buying the team. Advertising and communications is a people business. Of course, people are cyclical, and partners in a business can change—especially when they become wealthy. We spend about $9 billion annually on people, but we don’t spend enough time evaluating that investment. The conventional wisdom in our business is if you need people, you poach them. The industry will not survive long term unless we change this attitude.

Which reminds me of this from Chairman Jobs, back in 1995 (recently blogged/tweeted/statused from @arainert):

Q. So you think your talent is in recruiting?

SJ. It’s not just recruiting. After recruiting, it’s building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision — all those things.

Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I’ve found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way.

In a couple weeks, I’ll be starting a new job (deets later) and thought it was time to clean the rust off the tools in my toolbox. I’m starting an ugly little blog called “Learn to Code Already (and while you’re at it, learn some data, too)”. During my union organizing days, I wrote code to pay the bills (hopeless political causes are romantic and certainly the good fight, but they are financially suspect). When I became a digital/interactive/game designer, some time in 1996 – 1997, I realized that basic computer knowledge could have a huge impact on the quality and innovation of a design. My computer knowledge was basic:

- databases (I wrote programs in C and Java for Paradox and DBase IV and in Visual Basic for Access)
- command loops
- data variables and structures like arrays, lists, and structs
- conditions (if … then)

The only hard part, conceptually was learning about relational databases once my freelance work required me to move past flat file systems. The rest was pretty straightforward, requiring some rote, some instructive debugging, and excitement at what these things might do. (I learned BASIC on TRS-80 and within a week was hooked, writing D&D character generators, lunar lander games, and even the beginnings of a Zork-style adventure game.)

With this small bit of knowledge, some free time, and youthful arrogance and curiosity, I was able to write database programs for health organizations, artificial intelligence routines for a deer hunting game as well as several classic board games, re-write the timesheets reporting program so I could get better data on my clients at R/GA, create small HTML tools that sped up and improved the accuracy of posting to client review sites . . . to name some highlights.

Today, those skills are rusty and there are new languages and types of languages that make me want back in. As I wrote to a programmer friend of mine:

* I’m frustrated that I no longer have a coding language or tool to play with ideas (I used to have VB and that allowed me to write bulletmaker and a new timesheets program for Nike as well as a deer AI).
* I’m frustrated that it’s so hard to find a place to start
* I want to start a new language
* I want to blog about coding. I bought “learntocodealready.com” and want to make it a group blog for four or five people to record their progress, save resources, share tips, and build the case that code is the cell unit of creativity

He wrote back:

Nice. Just last weekend I realized there were far more powerpoints on my computer than source code files. Not good.

So starting digging in with jquery tutorials.

It’s also worth highlighting Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed argument. Read it yourself, but the short version is: we can master our tools, or let them drag us along by the nose and hope we go somewhere interesting. Or as the good folks at Whole Earth Catalog used to say, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

I’m starting with Python, using Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way, a book targeted at absolute beginners and which strives not to teach Python in a hard way, but in a way that has lasting value.

Three goals for the site:

1) convince people that learning to code is valuable, fun, and attainable. Further, that it should be part of our literacy in the digital age, especially if we’re in that business.

2) Collect resources, inspirations, code snippets, and advice that clears the way for people to start learning at a level and in an environment that works for them.

3) Collect little tidbits of information, inspiration and wisdom from my own experience working through some Python books, then getting into HTML 5, then PHP/MySQL.

Ping me if you want to join up: kip dot voytek at gmail dot com.

An oldie, but an enduringly good one, Business Week interviews Steve Jobs about how he did what he did at Apple and Pixar.

On the need to think teams:

No major work that I have been involved with has been work that can be done by a single person or two people, or even three or four people. Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes — that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.

The difference between A people and B people can vary from 2:1 to 500:1, depending on the field, so while it’s always good to get the A players, some times it’s critical.

Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream. That’s what we’ve done. You can then build a team that pursues the A+ players. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

You recruit A talent not with recruiters or even key players, you do it with the whole company and its culture:

After recruiting, it’s building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision — all those things. Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I’ve found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way.

No manager should consider himself too busy to recruit (and keep top talent):

Assume you’re by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You’d take a lot of time finding the partner, right? He would be half of your company. Why should you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.

Great stuff. I only wish there were more about the culture and understanding team moments.

Just spent another weekend doing a Boulder Digital Works executive training session. Always great, always a treat learning from attendees and folks at CP+B, Mondo Robot, and Colle + Mcvoy. About four sessions ago, we started adding reading lists, resources, and tips to the end of each of our presentations. That’s always a fun exercise, seeing which things have had the most impact on your thinking over various stretches of time.

One of the underlying themes of the BDW workshops is around ‘getting digital’. It’s a tricky phrase, implying various unprovable states of binary and raising the question of whether digital is even a useful word (much better, to my mind, to use interactive to emphasize behaviors and relationships over technologies and channels). Anyway, below is my list of things for my planning presentation. Interestingly, I had no overlap with any of Edward Boches’s books on his BDW list.

Emergence, Steven Johnson
Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge (CD is key)
101 Things I learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick
Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson
Design of Business, Roger Martin
Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink

These books have a common theme: they’re meta and address how thinking has changed.

Emergence talks about learning to embrace complex and rich results that emerge from simple rule sets, a key piece of game design and IxD thinking.

Designing Interactions is so wide-ranging in its examples that we learn that there are no golden rules or silver bullets and that every problem must be solved (or conjured up before solving) on its own terms.

101 Things I learned from Architecture School introduces the loftiest and most pedestrian aspects of the craft emphasizing that you need them all to be great.

Where Good Ideas Come From highlights the importance of connectedness, constant curiosity, apophenia, and how a culture can kill or foster creativity.

Design of Business is hard-nosed and cognitively rich discussion of design thinking (as opposed to the whispy “we are all designers now” kind of crap that can be read in two hours.

Whole New Mind highlights not only that we have many modes with which to turn on our brains, but many modes with which to engage people around us (turns out there’s more than story! there’s metaphor, and symphony, and meaning, and…).

The second half of the slide — about things you can do to get more digital, got some raised eyebrows:

Get to level 20 in World of Warcraft (ferrealz) — experience the richness of an interactive world, see how great interactive experiences derive not from one big idea, but hundreds of little ones, see how much more goes on than sweat and twitch, watch the wild emergent creativity of other players (my favorites are still the same-sex marriage I stumbled into in Stormwind, and the dwarf who got undressed and told me jokes in return for a gold piece).

Do your info-graphics in Illustrator — overcome the tool tyranny of powerpoint, learn about bezier curves, care about pixels, get some cognitive empathy with visual designers, and do better work

Play with the “Game of Life” or Turtle Art — emergence, pure and simple. Gorgeous, intriguing things like gliders, spinners, shooters and sustainable systems come through.

I actually really think that non-digitals should do all three of these things. Immerse, always immerse!

Nice talk by John Cleese about creativity. Things that emerge for me:

1) sleep on it — he has a great story about losing a killer first draft of a sketch, forcing himself to re-write it from memory a day later, finding the first draft and discovering that the second draft was quite a bit better. Creativity isn’t a moment in time, the unconscious mind, different parts of the mind, create even when you’re not consciously setting out to do it. Reminds me a little of the story about Ray Bradbury reading Moby Dick 60 times and certain parts 100 times to ‘get it into the bloodstream’ as a source of creativity when writing the screenplay for the movie.

2) don’t get interrupted — find the flow, nothing new here, but there’s something refreshing about the lack of theory and his willingness to use simple language and simple stories to convey his “system” (which he doesn’t have, he just has some thoughts)

3) we don’t know where ideas come from — at first blush it feels like he weakly answers this (funny, but weak) but I think there’s something powerful in refusing to answer the questions, insisting that we don’t know, insisting that it isn’t from our tools and referring us back to the mysteries of the unconscious to force us to cultivate creativity instead of looking for ideas.

4) stop the mania — if you’re just keeping the balls in the air, “you’re not going to have creative ideas”.

Before a rather frightening riff on self-awareness, he describes creativity as our little tortoise mind a timid, plodding, easily spooked thing (I suppose, the editing only leaves us the image, not the setup) and advises: “Set boundaries of space . . . boundaries of time, create a physical and mental oasis . . . then and only then can you play.”

’nuff said.

A couple months ago, I posted about the need to improve the way we celebrate failure. My big beef was the lack of accountability within the word fail and the inability to distinguish between a useful failure and a f#$%-up. Still think that, but have found two expressions of failure that have boundaries, express the point of failing, and are useful.

The first one comes from Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World. Frauenfelder is a founder of boingboing and editor in chief of Make Magazine. The book covers his post-dot-boom look for a less expensive, less frivolous, more meaningful life. Three goals he and his wife set out for themselves were: 1) “take more control of our lives”; 2) “cut throught the absurd chaos of modern life and find a path that was simple, direct, and clear”; and 3)”forge a deeper connection and a more rewarding sense of involvement with the world around us.” The book’s chapter are walks through of various moments and types of DIY living, thinking and playing: how to kill your front lawn to make room for a garden; DIYing a better, cheaper source of coffee than Starbucks; making music with homemade instruments. (Sadly, no electronics.)

Anyway, the second chapter is titled “The Courage to Screw Things Up.” It’s designed to get people over the learning curve of DIY, one which is messy, costs some money, might get you an electric shock, some nasty cuts, some ruined clothes, and the occasional hole in a wall. DIY types classically take on a project that’s too big for them, muck it up, and then quit. MisterJalopy, a legendary maker (who remains anonymous), counsels that you embrace those early screw-ups, not just to get past them:

No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrong-headed and foolish. Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up

Fraunefelder summarizes: the act of failing “is the only way to equip [yourself] with the mental toolbox of a successful DIYer”. That works for me. Fits in with the notion of failing as experimenting — failures are paths to learning more about your materials, the techniques of the craft and how they interact with environmental factors, and in taking apart a problem and putting together solutions. Dig it.

The other one comes from the Make: Electronics book. It’s a simple slogan: “Burn things out, mess things up — that’s how you learn.” Again, a call for experimenting. When you burn out a component, like an LED light, you learn about polarity (especially if it’s your last one), you learn about current, surges in electricity, resistance and capacitance. Mess things up is a nice phrase to use, since it pushes you into a ‘mixing things up’ place — the tinkerer’s idea of grabbing anything that works, taking it apart and seeing if you can’t make it work a little better or differently or just figure out what it does. Frauenfelder has a nice line about Misterjalopy:

I was charmed by his perspective of the world as a hackable platform, something to be remade and remodelled to his exacting, eccentric, yet infectiously appealing aesthetic sensibilities … In his world, the things around you should have meaning, and his way of giving them meaning is by collecting, customizing, rebuilding, and combining them in ways that make him happy.

(Mister Jalopy can be found at www.hooptyrides.com)

GS&P just put out a gorgeous and inviting teaser/trailer for the Adobe Museum of Digital Media. It’s a beautiful, well executed virtual museum. The creatives have done some interesting things around conceiving of a virtual building that could live in any real city (or virtual rendering of a real city), and how to move about and recreate the sense of sight lines and movement of a real place.

The whole exercise is a preview, so it’s hard to know what we’ll be seeing in August, but I tend to be pretty meh about virtual anything. It seems like an easy impulse that we’ve lived with for many years: put the word virtual in front of anything and you have a concept for digital, along with a baseline for solving most of your design problems.

I did a talk last weekend to museum and art publishers about where e-Readers and interactive reading were going. To prep for the talk, I grabbed a bunch of art books for the iPad. In general, the results were far from magical. The interactions were banal, click and play kind of stuff. But, one of the books that horrified me was “The Art Authority”:

Seeing this screen gave me flashbacks to early CD-ROM designs and BOB from Microsoft. Back then, we used metaphors and virtualizations because, I think, computers were new to people and we wanted them to feel comfortable and grounded. To do that, we tried to give them a sense of physicality.

There are all sorts of problems with physicality in designing interactive/digital/screen-based experiences: 1) you use a lot of real estate for the interface-metaphor and therefore less space for the content; 2) the interface-metaphor behaves in an insistent way, continually making itself the center of attention, rather than fading back into the role of facilitator/quiet mediator of content; 3) interface-matephors pull you into a level of specificity that can actually break rather than create an illusion of physicality. As a result, most of them are cheesy or childish.

To be clear, GS&P have gone farther and built something virtually that would be impossible in the real world. Already, we’re in the realm, then of speculative architecture rather than simple virtual thinking. And, as I mentioned above, the experience is beautiful and the space is interesting, so the speculative architecture aspect of the project is quite teh awesum.

But despite the coolness of the building, there’s still a need to justify the overhead of the interface-metaphor. In the physical world, you need a physical museum to show art. That physical world has requirements that make museums great architecture: the environment to protect the art, how crowds are managed, what the space for art encounters is like, what kind of art can be shown, what the building says about the art within, what an art viewing session is like, and what the building does for the viewer as a piece of art itself.

The internet is already a ‘place’ where art is displayed. So, what do we get out of putting a virtual building in between the internet and the art that would normally live there? And is it worth the costs of the overhead (especially if people are viewing it on an iPad or something smaller)?

The part that’s really interesting to me, is the way the video for the interviews was handled. There’s a satellite transmission aspect to the video, the purpose of which is unclear:

If I ventured to guess, I would say the idea was to stylistically degrade the reality of the real talking heads to dial up the reality of the virtual building. But that graininess goes away when the trailer shows team meetings, so I can’t be sure. Leaving aside the motivation, however, the degraded scan lines do highlight, even or create discomfort with the larger metaphor by once again calling attention to what’s being done rather than than the art that will, eventually, be displayed.

In a real museum (or I should say a Real Life Museum), the trailer would be about how the curators and the museums conceived of the show — how did we choose the themes and the art, what popular and academic understandings of the artists did we want to explore or explode, how did we arrive at the final works, what collaborations and personalities came to bear on the final product — not how the space was conceived.

Enough. Twitter version:

When we do virtual things, we need to ask, what’s the star of the show, what’s the point, is there balance, and are we serving the content?