kip/bot/blog

Oikos (οἴκος) meaning “House + Nemein (νέμω) meaning “To manage”

One of the things the iPad debate is missing is consideration of household and customer decision-making. Many of the conversations out there ask legitimate questions about whether the iPad meets real needs well. Other conversations have legitimate points about how it’s an important step in improving human computer interactions even if the need isn’t clear. What’s missing, and I think this is an interesting design discussion, is how people make high consideration purchases.

One of the biggest mistakes in the discussion is likening the iPad to the iPhone or iPod. Both the iPhone and the iPod were entries into well-established categories — mobile phones and portable music (I’m thinking Walkmans here, not MP3 players). Both categories had known pain points. For the phone there were crappy interfaces, the number pad as input device, and for me the miserable voice mail systems. For the music players there was the tradeoff between how many songs you had with you and how heavy/cluttered your bag would be (Walkman and Discman), or what a pain in the neck it was to get music onto your MP3 player. Apple walked into a known category which was serving known needs poorly and addressed pain points within it. For consumers already inclined to spend their money in this space, Apple’s premium price point wasn’t a problem — and millions gladly paid for the superior product.

The iPad purchase decision, however, happens in a different space - One in which people aren’t already spending money in the category to meet their need or where they are meeting their needs in other ways that don’t particularly suck. The not particularly sucking is important:

- books and eReaders work fairly well
- game consoles and portable game devices work extremely well (I’m gonna ignore the various rings of death on the XBox)
- people have TVs and iTouches for watching stuff and they work well

(Netbooks kind of suck and web browsing on a laptop often sucks, so Apple has an insight there, though it’s not clear that the iPad is really a tablet or netbook competitor.)

This is a pretty weak set of impulses to buy a high-price device. The urgency for the purchase of the iPad is much less than the iPod (I need to have my tunes in my bag! at the gym, in the car, at the office!) or the iPhone (I hate my phone; I don’t want to carry an iPod, a camera, and a phone). Lots of momentum and lots of day-to-day justification to drop some real coin in the phone and music player category . . . but where’s the energy for a mass audience on the iPad? I don’t see it — changing the way we compute is pretty tepid for something that’s more than half a thousand dollars — with which you can buy an XBox and best-selling titles, a good digital camera, a good netbook, a flat screen tv in the bedroom. It’s also a nice sum not to spend at all.

Put this decision in the context of a semi-affluent, or non-affluent household. Think of a family where money decisions of this size are made by two people and against larger issues like mortgages, tuition, college savings, car payments, etc. That person is spending $500 for . . . what?

Add to that, the number of devices already present in someone’s home:

- a flat screen TV
- a gaming console (that may be netflix-enabled)
- a desktop computer and/or a laptop
- a mobile phone and/or an iPod touch
- a DVD player that plays Hi-Def and may be netflix enabled

Hard to see how this conversation ends in a purchase: Honey, I want something for games that are bigger than my DS, but not as big as my TV. Darling, lets drop $500 so we can watch TV in bed on this thing (which I’ll need to buy a stand for) instead of the laptop or the TV. But sweetie, I need a bigger media screen for movies on the subway, my Touch doesn’t cut it.

In grad school, I loved when Robert Heilbroner would remind people of the origins of the word economics — household management. Managing the household is something we still do, but as marketers or product designers we tend to ignore the larger household in which a purchase decision is made (at least those marketers or product designers participating in the iPad frenzy). I think it’s an interesting design question and might make me feel less small-minded as I repeat that the iPad will sell well as a web appliance, but it won’t be much bigger than the Apple TV.

Way, way back in in 1989 (the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the other subway series, Tiannanmen, release of Mandela), I worked at a foundation that funded environmental, community development, and some cultural groups. While there, I heard a great story about a simple solution. It involved Lester Brown, head of Worldwatch.

Brown was presenting at an event sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (a foundation created by later, more progressive Rockefeller cousins) and someone asked the question: “if you could get people to do one thing, what would it be?” Brown is said to have thought a very long time about this question, uncomfortably long for some, when he finally answered: “get people to ride bikes.”

This was a simple solution to many, many, many problems: by using bikes instead of cars or public transit, carbon emissions would be reduced, by getting people to ride they would have fewer heart problems, live healthier. Bikes require less infrastructure and generally pose fewer delays in people’s live so they reduce stress. David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries makes the charming argument that biking around cities makes him “feel more connected” and provides insights into “the mind of my fellow man.” And bikes are just nifty.

Seems like another simple solution is emerging twenty years later: cook for yourself. For a variety of reasons, I’ve resumed cooking and a friend recommended The Flavor Bible. The introduction has a nice little closing:

Ultimately, cooking offers the opportunity to be immersed in one’s senses and in the moment like no other activity, uniting the inner and outer selves. At these times, cooking transcends drudgery and becomes a means of meditation and even healing. . . . It is little surprise to us, then, that when US Poet Laureate Charles simic was asked by New York Times’s Deborah Soloman earlier this year “What advice would you give people who are looking to be happy?” his response was “For starters, learn how to cook.”

Now, The Nation has an article titled “We Don’t Need a Food Revolution, We Just Need to Learn How to Cook”. It begins with the line:

We need radical thinking, but we don’t need a revolution. We don’t need an overthrow of capitalism. Nor do we need to become vegetarians. We need not become spartans. We’re just going to have to learn how to cook.

Sadly, the rest of the article is mostly about Americans: 1) needing less protein than we think; 2) eating only choice cuts while leaving other interesting bits (kidney, tripe, liver, brisket) to our pets and the rest of the world; and 3) the protein paradox of feeding out protein sources (livestock) more food than we need to feed 4 billion people. It’s less about how a lifestyle change would work or connect to Simic’s line.

Still, my apophenic brain circuitry has latched onto this. I’m getting too many signals in a short period of time to ignore it: David Byrne’s bicycle book, the resurfacing of the Lester Brown story, the Simic quote, my own interest in cooking (and not spending obscene amounts of money for a salad at Pret a Manger), the Nation headline (if not the article in Google Reader).

Nifty little exercise where a group of designers turn a train station staircase into a piano keyboard (a la the classic scene from Big) in order to get people to engage in the healthier behavior of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. THey conclude:

“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better” and the slightly more difficult translation “Add fun changes common behavior”

Here’s a mini-version of the upcoming documentary about William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind:

Watching it today, William’s comment about needing electricity to get to the internet (at 5:21) struck me: “Most people want internet technology, but they can’t use internet technology without electricity.”

This reminds me of some of the smug criticisms of the OLPC project, where critics were piling on that it was inappropriate to provide web access, learning tools, and technology to these countries when there were other pressing needs. While I don’t disagree that there are other pressing needs, this blithe criticism seems ill-informed in light of what William has done for his village with access to a small number of (old) books and the way he has framed electricity as a path to economic development, prevention of famine, increased education, and more culture and enjoyment of life.

Just finishing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind as the author, William Kamkwamba caps off his US speaking tour with a Daily Show interview (tomorrow). With the money he has raised, William has added solar panels to his village, another windmill and has achieved his goal of irrigating the land for a second season of planting. Now, he’s raising money for a variety of projects on his website.

There is a great range of things to donate to:

Wimbe Primary School Windmill
Cost: $300
Priority: medium

Books for Village Library
Cost: The need for books is high. $3,000-$5,000 will help further this extensive project.
Priority: high

Practice Jerseys and Children’s-Size Soccer Balls for Wimbe Primary School
Cost: $700, including shipping
Priority: high

Women’s Netball Uniforms
Cost: approximately $5,000
Priority: medium

Secondary School Scholarships
Cost: $2,000 for 20 students (10 in public school, 10 in boarding school)
Priority: high

Football Goal Nets (Soccer)
Cost: $3,000
Priority: medium

New Primary School
Cost: estimated at a minimum of $50,000
Priority: medium

I like the priorities here: the new school is less of a priority than the scholarships, which are the same priority as soccer balls. It’s realistic about giving kids a complete education and life. (For my part, I donated to the book initiative.)

About 3/4 of the way through The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (that’s the Amazon link, the author’s site is here). Terrific book on so many levels. In short, it’s the story of a 13 - 14 year Malawian boy (William Kamkwmaba) who, unable to pay tuition for school after a devastating famine (which his family managed to survive) spends his time reading books about electricity and manages to build, over the course of several months, a windmill (seen above). The story is broader, covering life in his village, the tragic story of the famine, but the arc points towards the windmill.

Oddly, despite my bleeding heart-left tendencies, this is the first time I’ve read a first person account of life during a famine or day-to-day living anywhere in Africa, so nearly everything in the book was a revelation. Right from the beginning, there’s the mix of magic and science in William’s life:

BEFORE I DISCOVERED THE miracles of science, magic ruled the world. Magic and its many mysteries were a presence that hovered about constantly, giving me my earliest memory as a boy—the time my father saved me from

His discovery of science is classic circuit-bender/hacking:

the integrated circuit are little things that look like beans. These are transistors, and they control the power that moves through the radio into the speakers. Geoffrey and I learned this by disconnecting one transistor and hearing the volume greatly reduce. We didn’t own a proper soldering iron, so to perform repairs on the circuit boards, we heated a thick wire over the kitchen fire until it became red hot, then used it to fuse the metal joints together.

Working with whatever left-over pieces he can find, he experiments with anything he can get his hands on and open. In this case, the radio-hacking led to a small repair business. William’s self-education in electronics is interrupted by the famine which nearly kills his immediate family and takes a toll on everyone around him. He describes a funeral tradition from his uncle’s burial, which reminded me of how little I actually know about Africa:

every grave has a hidden compartment at the bottom—usually a smaller cubbyhole carved into the side of the pit—where the coffin slides in. It’s like having your own little bedroom in death. The purpose is to protect the deceased from the falling dirt, or really, to keep the family from seeing the falling dirt land on the coffin.

In the midst of the famine — which is several months of excruciating hunger and day-to-day management of its pains and attempts to secure and ration food — William writes, “DURING THIS TIME OF trouble, I discovered the bicycle dynamo.” The whole book is written with an innocent sense-of-wonder voice and you gotta love a chapter that starts like this. The bicycle dynamo is the little device that attaches to a bike wheel and turns the pedaling into electricity. William’s dissection of the device leads him to a bigger vision:

Without realizing it, I’d just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn’t know what this meant until much later. After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance? The dynamo had given me a small taste of electricity, and that made me want to figure out how to create my own. Only 2 percent of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem. Having no electricity meant no lights, which meant I could never do anything at night, such as study or finish my radio repairs, much less see the roaches, mice, and spiders that crawled the walls and floors in the dark. Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and just goes to sleep. Not at 10:00 P.M., or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.

This sets up what is at stake as William spends his schoolless months trolling through scrap heaps, digging up unused PVC, pillaging parts from junk, and experimenting with ways to turn a bicycle dynamo into a wind-based power source. There’s so much to write about from this book (what his education was like when he could afford it, the local economy’s more nuanced functioning, how world culture finds it way into his village via radio and the near-random cinema showings), so I’ll reco the book and grab a few more quotes about his inventor side.

Inventiveness:

I didn’t have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades. I then wired them together. I didn’t have any pliers, so I used two bicycle spokes to bend and tighten the wires on the blades.

The power of self-education:

One day I was looking in some weeds and found the differential of a four-wheel drive. Using my screwdriver, I pried it open and discovered loads of fresh black engine grease. I scraped it into a plastic bag for future use. I also found cotter pins and tangled bits of wire, in addition to things I’d probably never use—brake pedals, gear levers, and the crankshaft of a small car engine.

William’s dreams:

One day I pretended to be a great mechanic, crawling on my back under the old rusted cars and tractors with the tall grass clutching me in its arms. I shouted up to the customer. “Start it up! Let’s see how she sounds…push the gas, don’t be shy! Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s too much!” The engine didn’t sound right, so I gave it to them straight: “Looks like you’ll need an overhaul. I know, I know, it’s expensive, but it’s life.” I shouted to my other mechanics, who were slacking as usual. “Phiri, today you’re doing oil changes!” “Yes, boss!”

His vision:

Once I had more wire and a car battery, I explained, I could store electricity for the times when the wind stops blowing. It could also provide light for the entire house. It would have to be done little by little, but once complete, it would save my parents the money they normally spent on kerosene, and that was just the beginning. The next machine would pump water for our fields. One day, windmills would be our shield against hunger. That night, I was too excited to sleep. After everyone went to bed, I stayed awake and flipped through Explaining Physics, preparing for the next step.

Love this book. Check out his blog also. William is touring the US telling his story and he visited the famous Seattle Public Library.

Bryan and I presented at one of the coolest places so far on our tour: the Seattle Central Public Library. Just think, I started this entire journey in a small library in Wimbe Primary School that only had three shelves of books. So when I saw this place in Seattle, I nearly fell over. If a city puts this much energy and money into their public library, it’s a city for me.

Love this book. That is all.

During President Obama’s Inaugural Address, lots of people got jazzed, and many tweeted about supporting, celebrating, and being “”the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.” MAKE Magazine is building the Maker Faire and the most recent issue of the magazine about the transformative power of DIY — to innovate,to satisfy, and to solve problems.

In the intro to the issue, Editor Dale Dougherty, makes the big but cool claim that “makers offer one of the best hopes for the future.” He has a list of things people can do to “Make Things”; improve “Energy Usage” (monitoring and improving home usage; make “Transportation” smarter and better for us (bicycles, electric cars, reduced transport overall); better handling of “Food and Water” (raise your own chickens!, cook (gasp!)); and do more “Learning”. I hope the list gets viral (I don’t want to do two scans), but it’s worth re-typing the “Make Things” list:

Make things that people want
Make things so that you don’t need to buy them
Start a business that employs people making things
Make things closer to where they’ll be used
Repair things instead of replacing them
Harvest usable components from devices and redeploy them
Get to know your local salvage yard and recycling center

For a while I have been, not obsessed but itched, by the notion that environment and sustainability has a big maker hook. In an age where men can no longer tinker with their cars (they’re too chip-based, and the engines are increasingly black boxes), focusing on their power supply, tweeking their environment, making their stuff last longer and hacking it to work better, could be a satisfying alternative.

Sadly, for me, the first place my head goes is my last trip to a hardware/home supplies store and my urge to buy a sewing machine and make pillows and curtains, cuz I hate buying that stuff. Ah save . . . I also had the urge to hack motherlovin’ sh*t out of solar panel backup systems at Home Depot. (Flickr link provided as proof that I had this impulse BEFORE admitting to the sewing one. Excessive swearing purely out of compensation, of course.)

White Roofs for a Green Planet | EcoGeek | Roofs, White, Enough, Heat, Buildings
“if the 100 biggest cities painted all their roofs white, and switched their road materials to lighter colors (concrete instead of asphalt) it would reflect enough light and heat back into space to entirely offset the warming of the last few decades.”

Listed in lots of other places, but preserved here for my easy access: Google filed a patent for wave-powered data centers, specifically, pelamis wave-powered centers. Cool patent diagram, and cool video showing how much power the ocean contains.