kip/bot/blog

Posting two vids, the first of an IxD talk in London using stop-motion animation to explain wireframes, the second of balsamiq’s demo of its paper meets dreamweaver tool. The first one, the stop-motion, is supposed to be faster than digital wireframing (in Visio, Illustrator, InDesign, etc.). It looks cool, has some personality, but it seems that chopping up bits of paper, setting them on other bits of paper, shooting the moments with a camera and then putting it in a movie, takes a lot more time than a well-designed, quickly executed digital frame. Anyway, it’s cool to see iMovie used in conjunction with other tools.

UX London redux video: Jane Austin & Chris Neale on sketching from Martin Belam on Vimeo.

And balsamiq, which doesn’t embed:

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.

Waterfall has become a weasel word — a word that has a lot of emotional impact, but has lost its original meaning and replaced it with virtually no meaning at all. For several years, across several environments, I’ve encountered communications or been in meetings where something is labelled as “waterfall” and immediately we talk about how to replace it — frequently without asking what it means or if it’s a bad thing.

Waterfall has emotional throw weight in labeling something as: non-collaborative (in which case, the metaphor should be silo); too rigid (in which case you could say lock-stop, or maybe even stick with rigid); and non-innovative (which is just name-calling and definitionally devoid of meaning so there’s no superior word choice, aside from maybe just to call someone stupid). So what does it actually mean?

Let’s return to the image of the waterfall (specifically the one on the right, cuz that works better):

The image of the waterfall implies irreversibility — you can’t go back once the water has gone over a fall. I understand that it’s possible for processes to go astray. But is locking in on some irreversible decisions really a bad thing? Don’t we want to avoid re-visiting decisions? Don’t we want to create a culture/team/process that takes early/important/foundational decisions seriously? Don’t we want to tighten our focus on making individual parts better? (As chairman Jobs says: “Focus isn’t what you say yes to, it’s all the things you say no to.”) Don’t we want to put first things first, get foundational stuff out of the way?

Just saw in his blog that David Byrne has published/will publish Bicycle Diaries an account of his biking around his hometown of NYC and around countries where he’s touring and travelling. It seems kind of cool — after getting hooked on biking in NYC, he started taking a folding bike with him on his travels. I used to work on 12th and Broadway and would see Byrne fairly regularly on his bike — he was elegant, cool, looking at everything with that sense-of-wonder smile. Can’t wait to see the book. (I also saw George Plimpton and Spalding Gray (RIP) in the neighborhood a lot. Plimpton rode what we now seek out as a vintage bike with a ridiculous white basket with a blue flower on the front).

Interesting sidenote: Byrne’s book has already been published in Serbia and the UK, but will be published in mid-September quickly followed by a half-dozen other countries. One of those stars more beloved abroad than here.

Finally, here’s a video from WSJ online of Byrne’s partipation in the bike rack contest that he judged and participated in:

A colleague just sent me a link to an MIT student project/installation site, called “Personas: How does the internet see you?”, which is part of a larger exhibit called Metropathologies. You type in your name and it assesses what you are/do/care about based on on-line presence. Fun idea, great animation during the algorithm crunch, surprising results:

(Click image for larger, cleaner version.)

Amused: sports so large, fashion that it shows up at all (must be based on client lists)
Saddened: politics is so little (and in black! like a mournful armband)
Pleased: design and art seem to be big
Concerned: medicine?
Can’t tell if this blog is covered in it . . . that might explain the sports, what about flickr? Need to explore.

Just signed up for bookarmy this morning. Someone had posted on an old entry of mine that it was pretty good, but first impressions can be killer. Leaving aside some confusing design issues (a mix of authors, readers, reviews, publisher descriptions, and user-generated content threw me off), the first recommendation was beyond terrible. After you sign-up, you ‘get started now!’ by entering a book. I entered my standard Unbearable Lightness of Being. Not only is it a favorite book that I go back to again and again, it’s also the classic example of how weak recommendation systems are — Amazon seems to always indicate that if I liked that book by Milan Kundera, I might like these books. Until very recently, all these other books are invariably by Milan Kundera — like reading more of this author hadn’t occurred to me.

So what did I get at bookarmy?

In fairness, the top listings can be hard to sort out, so I went to the second page of recos:

This would almost have to be driven entirely by “people who read this also read this” with little to no reliance on even basic publishing data such as genre, period, fic/non-fic. Bummer. I’ll give it a few more titles.

I recently moved from squared Moleskins to blank ones and found it liberating. When I went to the Municipal Art Society’s Urban Center Books store to replenish they were out of stock. But! They had a nifty new (to me) line of notebooks: Whitelines (cue earworm). Lookie!

White rules on a grey background. The lines don’t pop too much, don’t fight with the lines you’re putting down, and, the guy at the counter told me, they don’t show up in photocopies!

This might even be better than the notebooks that just have the vertex dots.

Oh! They’re not terribly expensive either. An 8.5 by 11 with 48 sheets (96 pages) is only $4.50. Might have to buy a couple cases before the price goes up or we embargo those clever Swedes.

http://www.whitelines.se/

There are lots of articles, tools, books, exercises out there about how to generate ideas and all of them deal in one way or another with brainstorms. Over the years, we’ve all read about the various faultlines: how many people, how is it structured, what kind of people, rules of engagement, handling evaluation of ideas, facilitation, how much and what kind of prep prior, follow-through after, fresh eyes vs already immersed.

Inevitably, over the course of long dialogs about how, whether, and why brainstorm, someone points out that the final ideas almost never come out of brainstorms, leading to a conclusion of ‘why bother’, ‘rethink it (once again) from scratch’, or ‘keep doing them, but don’t put too much energy into them.’

I’ve always valued brainstorms for things other than (or in addition to) the actual ideas they bring. After a brainstorm, people, especially those who are leading the project or will stay with it for a while, leave with certain things:

Fans of Carl Sagan or viewers of the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation are familiar with the phrase “primordial soup.” It’s a rich collection of proteins, amino acids, and highly active and interactive materials out of which the material of life can emerge. It is not life, it is not the beginning of evolution. Rather, it’s the source material from which organic matter/lifestuff will emerge. All it needs is an infusion of energy, some random mutations, conditions which are hostile enough to challenge but supportive enough to engage and then life begins, mutates, and evolves.

Brainstorms should be viewed, and maybe conducted, in this way — they generate the basic molecules and proteins of the creative process but are not the creative output itself.

Reading and thoroughly digging Steven Johnson’s Invention of Air and seeing an overlap with discussions about planning and innovation (clunky intro, but accurate).

Early in Johnson’s book, he tells the story of how we discovered the Gulf Stream. It was a convergence of vaguely, not immediately apparently, connected things. In the 1760s there were several things being observed by people engaged in undirected, scientific observation. Joseph Priestley was using the new Fahrenheit thermometer to measure ocean water temperatures at different depths and locations. He had no idea if it would add up to something, but was simply curious and observant. Benjamin Franklin had notices that there were “gulph weeds” present along certain lines of sight in the ocean, lines which had little connection to landmass or shorelines. Sailors were informally logging certain places where sailing was smoother and faster. There was also a fascination with and fear of waterspouts.

All of these things were unconnected or loosely connected, until a question about the postal system emerged: why does it take longer for letters to travel from Europe to America than it does for letters to travel in the opposite direction?

Johnson’s characterization of this intellectual convergence, says something about innovation and discovery:

[British authorities curious about this question] were lucky in another respect: the postmaster in question happened to be Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin would ultimately turn that postal mystery into one of the great scientific breakthroughs of his career: a turning point in our visualization of the macro patterns formed by ocean currents. Franklin was well-prepared for the task. As a twenty-year old, traveling back from his first voyage to London in 1726, he had recorded notes in his journal about the strange prevalence of “gulph weed” in the waters of the North Atlantic. In a letter written twenty years later, he had remarked on the slower passage westward across the Atlantic, though at the time he supposed it was attributable to the rotation of the earth.

There’s additional layers to this very compelling story (I just love Johnson’s books), but the key things of interest to me are the components of discovery and invention:

A theme that cuts across all of these is looseness of process connected to open-ness to the new. This is an occasional theme in innovation literature which talks about generosity of spirit, lateral inspiration and thinking, and the ability to quickly move in and out of modes of discourse, multiple configurations of ideas and data points.

(Image taken from http://www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org/)