kip/bot/blog

’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?

For several years, Steven Johnson’s Emergence, E O Wilson’s Journey of the Ants, and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science have bounced around in my head, inextricably/apophenically connected to ideas of creativity, invention, and generative systems. Wolfram’s book, which I could follow through the first three pages of each chapter before the specific science and maths lost me, came and went - people were open to its revelations, found none, then, it seemed, he sank into crankdom. But, in his TED talk, he seems to be pulling it together - computation science (as opposed to computer science or computing) is a source of ideas, beauty, computing power. Best line:

in a sense we can use the computational universe as a way of getting mass customized creativity … to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly … and find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer or incremental evolutionary process could ever come up with.

The celebration of failure has become a tired, counterproductive meme.

Sure, the tension involved in celebrating something normally thought to be bad gets your attention. It’s also a way to get people out of their comfort zone. So cheers for that.

But, really, we actually want to succeed and the more I read about failing forward, failing your way to success, and not being able to succeed without failing, the more I think the word does us a disservice on several levels. For starters, failure, it’s important to remember, is a broad umbrella. On the positive side, the one that’s worthy of fetishizing, it includes things that happened not to work. They didn’t fail so much as the client didn’t buy it, the market wasn’t ready for it, it was ahead of its time, or it was a good idea but not popular enough to be profitable. On the negative, however, failure also includes (and originally meant) screw-ups, incompetence, miscalculations, and arrogant dilettantism masquerading as expertise.

The problem is that the word failure doesn’t contain within it the means for evaluating good ones and bad ones. Failure doesn’t have an internal quality metric in its meaning that helps us identify the ones that actually advance the work and ones that should result in heads being knocked, going back to the drawing board, hitting the books, or putting together a new team.

Celebrating failure doesn’t help us increase our likelihood of doing quality work so much as it increases our chances of stumbling into it. By celebrating failure, we encourage peolpe and teams to try more, and more risky, ideas. But we don’t encourage people to focus on craft, execution, or a notion of quality. For some cultures, this might be good. If you’re in an environment that is so stale and idea-less that no one ever goes beyond the obvious, than you may need that jolt. But, in an environment that is already supposed to be about creativity, innovation, and design, you’re probably dumbing the place down. By talking about failure, rather than iteration and revving, we’re not advancing design thinking so much as inflating attitude. The word failure doesn’t have enough oomph in it to get people thinking.

Worst of all, I think, celebrating failure gives teams and people easy outs when something doesn’t go well. Since failure doesn’t contain a quality metric we have trouble describing what constitutes a useful failure. Most conversations about failure assume that everyone knows the actual complete screw-ups (do we really?) but don’t help identify the earnest, but ultimately wasteful, failures. As a result, when we fail, it’s easy to describe one’s self as taking a shot and missing but then celebrate the taking of the shot anyway. Rather than critique something to find out what the hell went wrong or, more productively, what do we do better, celebrating a failure implies that things were fine, it just didn’t work out.

To be clear, I think we should promote the taking of risks. I absolutely believe that the quality of an idea — its originality, elegance, or efficiency in solving a problem or doing something new and wonderful — should be celebrated even if the product ultimately doesn’t succeed in the marketplace or isn’t approved by the client. (I also think it would be an interesting exercise to see if celebrants of failure in the design world are willing to go so far as to call the Segway, Zune, and the XO successful failures.) But I think we should celebrate failure in a very different way: by calling it iteration, critique and refinement. Better yet, let’s call it experiment.

Experimentation is a much better word to use, though I already know it’s too wonky and beaker-y to catch on. Still, it’s worth talking about the difference if only to make the word we’ll be stuck with for the next year — FAILURE! — meaningful. Here’s the difference:

Let’s use a fresh example from an unexpected place: the iPhone. This is from the WIRED cover story:

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting

Jobs rather famously doesn’t celebrate failure. What he’s done in this moment is call something what it is — inadequate, not acceptable, deeply troubling. At the same time, however, he didn’t throw a tantrum. There was a critique in his assessment of the prototype/iteration/rev/version/experiment/failure — and it went beyond the bugs. Bugs can be solved and closed, the bigger issue was that it wasn’t coming together as a coherent product. That was a design moment, an experiment being evaluated — there was no celebration of failure.

As Nick Cage so memorably re-told the story in the immortal national treasure National Treasure: “When Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to fail 99 times trying to invent the light bulb, Edison said ‘I didn’t fail 99 times. I discovered 99 ways how NOT to make a light bulb.’”

Stop failing and patting yourself on the back for it. Start experimenting and stay focused on quality and success.

I’m convinced that there is a condition, that should be in upcoming DSM , of environmentally induced cognitive diminishment. I’m calling it “the Googles” and I believe I suffer from said Googles. I’ve been thinking about this condition since reading Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making us Stupid” (my blog bit about it here). Carr has witnessed several diminishments: Shortened attention spans, decreased ability to focus on complex ideas, and the near impossibility of thinking deeply about something. He attributes it to Google because their commercial model, which is central to so much of our knowledge seeking, encourages short-attention span and quantity of items viewed over quality of the viewing.

On first reading the article, I immediately saw myself and my friends in those symptoms — trouble reading novels, never reading an article to completion, rarely stopping to re-read a passage, and a rushed, frenetic sense that I need to quickly skim the next thing lest I miss something. Carr has an upcoming book that describes the situation as being chronically stuck in “the shallows”. But I think it actually goes deeper. I think the symptoms above have related symptoms and speak to a deeper condition:

- inability to formulate original thoughts within various pockets of my industry of internet marketing (and its sub-disciplines of design, UX, and strategy), it feels like our conversations are increasingly about analogies and metaphors and case studies. “Let’s do it like Apple”, “this is how Google rolls”, “we need to do for x category what this company did in y”, “let’s adopt this model”. These threads lack originality on two levels. First, it’s all by reference to something else. There’s no blank slate, there are no truly fresh looks (you may bring in fresh eyes, but that voice is usually just reacting and spouting first thoughts, not helping to go deeper than where you started). Second, it multiplies the shallowing effect Carr talks about. What does anyone mean when they reference Apple or Google? Do we really have a deep, shared understanding of what we’re agreeing to? Do we understand what it means in terms of day-to-day work?

- inability to have deep conversations or true information exchanges having the Googles means that my talking style has started to resemble the research/information gathering style above The person suffering from ‘the Googles’ has conversations full of quick hits across a wide range of topics and entries. Like a stone skipping across a lake, they never go deep. Googles-infected conversations tend to be the exchange of memes or the matching of related links. A colleague utters a word or phrase embedded in a sentence with deeper thought. But I latch onto that word and immediately my brain bubbles up search results of related links. Then, without connecting the dots or evaluating the context, I blurt out my top-ranked meme. My counterpart is just as likely to latch onto my keywords and do the same. We leave these conversations with a half-shared understanding of what we’re doing and lack the energy or will to push deep. Dialog is replaced by a semi-grounded free association of memes, references, and synaptic firings sparked by keywords in the sentences spoken.

So these are my symptoms, deficits, diminishments:

- shortened attention span
- reduced focus
- inability to follow complex texts
- difficulty staying in a deep conversation
- diving below the memes and hyperlinking in my brain into original thoughts

I call the cluster of symptoms ‘the Googles’ and I am starting treatment (next post . . . )

Just finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays about being a father, son, husband, former child, and writer. I read the book almost immediately and instantly, underlining lots of passages and phrases (wasn’t available in Kindle). Interestingly, it looks like guys on goodreads.com dug it less than women (might be more accurate to say several man trashed it while women gave it consistently high marks).

Beyond the observations about specifically male things, Chabon spends a great deal of time writing about how we flex our imaginations, and how we play and create as children and adults. He hits a lot of the same themes, through very different angles, as Gever Tully of the Tinkering School does in his various talks. While Tully talks about how we overprotect children and have lost the early male ritual of receiving a pocket knife, Chabon talks about the pointlessness of teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. When he rode a bike, he would disappear from his house for the entire day, exploring the neighborhood, visiting friends and just riding. Today, he feels like that has been supplanted through a fear of abductions and that kids have much less uncharted play time.

That theme of uncharted comes up throughout these essays, especially in “The Splendor of Crap”, an essay where he talks about the importance of junk culture in imagination, childhood and even adult play. I just love this passage about the old TV show The Planet of the Apes:

“There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars, TV SF to address weighty issues … But it remained a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequels to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had, crucially to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, even its cancellation . . . it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.”

Along these lines, he is actually rather critical of Pixar films (the first voice I’ve come across doesn’t worship every aspect of Pixar and its work). Chabon describes today’s animated movies:

The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

In a different essay, he makes a point that actually snapped my head out of the book. His biggest gripe about Pixar is the way they make Sid the villain in Toy Story. When Sid puts dresses on the cowboys and mixes parts and breaks the toys to see how they work, Chabon asks, isn’t he doing exactly what kids are supposed to do with toys? I had unquestioningly bought into the movie’s narrative, but after that comment, the good kid reminds me of a nerdy toy collector, keeping things MIB (mint in box), and suddenly I realize that leaving aside the ham-fisted presentation of Sid’s sadism, I actually relate much more to the dirt and grime and dark of Sid’s place than our hero kid’s room.

Not new, necessarily, to fans of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or Steven Johnson’s Emergence, but a nice twist.

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.

Just re-read Martin Neuimeier’s A Designful Company along with a bunch of my co-workers. Reading a book at the same time as other people is a fantastic thing to do — it sets of neuronic chain reactions and builds common language — and the book itself was pretty good. However, it highlights one of the things that continues to bother me about our collective obsession with innovation.

Neumeier has a passage where he describes his “good/different” chart. It’s not rendered as a quad graph in the Kindle version of the book, but given that it involves two variables with 2 possible values, it practically screams for one:

Like any good quad graph, “up and to the right” is the sweet spot, or, as Neumeier put it “as you might have guessed, ‘good and different’ is the combination that produces home runs.” This bugs me. While I know marketing is all about the whitespace, the onlyness, the thing that no one else does, it seems like a distraction from the real issue: quality and betterness. Good and different could translate into Netflix and the Prius (examples Neumeier cites). But it could also translate into another rev of Microsoft Word that has yet another feature which not only doesn’t make it better, it actually makes it marginally worse because of the clutter and confusion. This would still be “good but different” (making it worse didn’t make it bad).

“Good but different”, as a construct misprioritizes and muddies people’s thinking. Good can very easily become good enough (the Microsoft example) and can cause people to rush to novelty or newness as the goal. Rather than focusing on being better/best, we pick the most obvious and lowest possible standard (who would actually argue on behalf of not good?).

Netflix is much better understood not as different (they used the mail), but as better than the current space. Yes, they used mail, but they did so in order to address the flaws of the video store model: availability of films, locational convenience, and perhaps most important, late fees. Prius is still actually a car, but it’s a better car, not a different one: it burns fuels more efficiently, it runs quieter. The point wasn’t to be as good as the past, with a difference, the goal was to solve problems with fossial fuels and internal combustion engines.

We should really throw out the notion of being different and focus on being good, better, then best. Not only does it avoid the rush to novelty, but it forces product creators (marketers, designers, engineers) to get customer- and user-centric in their thinking. It forces us to step back and ask first questions: what is good/ what would be better? is our belief that the status quo is good really accurate? is our understanding of the category (video distribution) correct?

Scott Berkun has a great post about why we should stop saying innovation, with the great line, which to me says it all: “Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do.” This is a big cultural change for most places because an understanding of quality, of what is actually good is usually missing (or not shared or driven by individual tastes) and a conversation to understand what’s good requires time. Much easier to assume that what’s in front of you is plenty good and look for something that makes it stand out. But that’s the real lesson of the above examples, a focus on doing something better, on solving the pain points.

Stop talking about innovation, stop looking for points of differentiation, build a better ________ and people will beat the proverbial cliche to your hackneyed portal and you’ll be all win-win in the sweet spot of whatever quad graph you have.

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.