kip/bot/blog

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.

After my TEDx Kent talk — a delightful romp though kipbot’s pissiness at how kids today don’t respect the amount of craft and expertise needed to do digital — someone recommended I read Rethinking Expertise, by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Collins and Evans are sociologists at Cardiff University who specialize in the acquisition and social understanding of knowledge and expertise. The book is

meant to increase the chance that the process of coming to be called an expert will have more to do with the possession of real and substantive expertise … to treat it as something other than relational

It’s quite a good read, though the introduction, and the purpose is kind of sad: “First we need to work out what it means to know what you are talking about.” What a sad task to have to take on.

There is a lot in this book to blog about, and I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I had an aha! on the subway (the realization and insight kind, not the marketing kind). The book is based on a ‘periodic table of expertises’, which contains a spectrum of knowledge levels around which we build our expertise. The spectrum reads:

beer mat knowledge - little trivia fun facts that are technically right, but doesn’t get you beyond definitions
popular understanding - such as a pop science book that gives you enough to talk about it at parties, but not enough to answer questions
primary source knowledge - reading books in the field
interactional expertise - doing it
contributory expertise - originating ideas in the field, serving as part of the peer community that defines and propels it

The last two are the areas of true expertise - people who study a field by immersing themselves in the primary literature (often in university) and then do the field, where they gain deeper knowledge and understanding, eventually moving into a kind of mastery where they shape the field with their contributions. The book is focused on science, so the idea can be understood, by majoring in biology, going to grad school where you study more primary literature, but are in a lab and teaching (interactional), and then doing some research that can be published as a contribution to the field (the dissertation).

Anyway, I love the beer mat analogy, and it’s actually real — they found a beer mat for Babycham company that tells you what a hologram is (with exclamation points too!). But the real insight for me was the faultline between primary source and interactional expertise. How many times have we made ourselves conversant in (and considered ourselves capable of managing) a field after reading a couple books in the field? Without doing the work, without reading something by or talking to someone who actually has done the work to see what the difference between dynamic interactional and static written knowledge would be. The degree of immersion is important here. In his reportage and non-fiction writing, Martin Amis regularly refers to reading a couple yards of books to get a handle on the field (specifically he was talking about nuclear disarmament policy and Stalin research). This was a huge insight for me as a manager and as an observer of other managerial cultures.

The other piece I really liked was the distinction around popular literature on a field. Somewhere between beer mats and text books are popularizations — the Stephen Hawking pop science stuff. I used to make fun of the Business Week cover dynamic in the internet industry — the day something gets covered in BW, the client or your boss calls and says “OMG we need to have this!!!!” But now, looking at the broader spectrum of expertise — going from beer mats out to doing and originating — I’m wondering if things like our beloved HBR, the sacred text to many of us (including me), is actually popular or primary.

PS Jeff Parks, in his talk, “Being Human is not Quantifiable” has a funny riff about expertise. While looking at Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours quote, he gently mocks the notion of a social media expert arguing that this stuff hasn’t been around long enough for some to put 10,000 hours into it!

I have a weird memory from a surfer movie. I can’t remember the title, and having never watched surfer movies aside from stopping briefly on the remote in between stops, I have no context for it. (Major exception to the previous sentences: Point Break, which, of course, transcends and resists genre classification.) So here’s the memory:

Some girl, wearing an old-fashioned, square cut bikini is talking to an older guy about her boyfriend-the-hero-of-this-movie’s chances at winning a surfing contest. The boyfriend is, of course, the underdog. He has been screwed by his wealthier, more practiced, less scrupulous, and prettier but less attractive opponents. The boyfriend is behind and his success depends on the next run. The girlfriend wonders what’s needed to pull off this surfing and life miracle.

The older guy is big, barrel-chested, chomping a cigar, wearing a tank top and hat and holding his binoculars. He looks pensive and says something like “well, he may have the skill, and he may catch a good wave, but he needs more than that . . . he needs a great, big chest full of character.” (Not sure how to spell chest full — chestful seems like treasure chest. Chest full feels too biological and ribcage focused.)

This kind of thinking is common to people and companies new to interactive work. There’s a belief that spirit and energy and character can overcome all obstacles, even the laws of physics or ignorance (or a bad wave). In the movies, we see repeatedly how someone can overcome absurd adversity with a pep talk, digging down and finding the fire, or coming up with a clever trick (that Karate Kid broken ankle thing). In the Olympics, many of the events give athletes three shots at getting it right, so that third attempt is a chance at making up for a suboptimal performance and bringing a lot of heart to win the gold. In distance events or timed sports, there’s always a hope that the runner can pour it on in the last five minutes, or the team can put together a series of scoring drives (touchdown!, on-sides kick!, touchdown!, interception!, gadget play! touchdown! ZOMG we won!).

But interactive isn’t like that. Notions of heart, digging deep, fishing something out of your bag of tricks doesn’t work. You’re usually up against laws of physics. As Fred Brooks reminds us, nine women in a month can’t make a baby — no matter how much character they have.

Interactive is like chess. It’s built on a foundation, there are virtually no clever tricks, no ways to surge and overcome a bad position. If you play a poor opening, your middlegame options are limited — you’re on the defensive. If your middlegame position is weak, you can’t go on the attack, even if you have a lot of heart for it. If your endgame is technically lost, all you can hope is that your opponent makes a mistake. But no pep talk or chirpy can-doism can change the fact that you have a lost position. You need to play to win from the beginning, you need to begin with a view of the end, you need to be in the now and be in the future calculating possible nows that may arise.

For my software surfer movie, some gems:

Measure twice, cut once.

Have a plan.

Explore the implications of your moves.

When you have a problem and hear someone say “oh, it’ll be fine, I’m not worried” a half tone higher than their usual voice, smack that person on the forehead until s/he starts worrying.

Track your projects early, not just two weeks out from launch.

In fact, don’t bother checking in two weeks out from launch, cuz if it’s broke it’s too late and you’re only gonna screw it up.

Don’t trust the happy optimists, fill your team with people who like solving puzzles and loathe inelegance and easy solutions.

Most important, keep your head in the game, look at the whole board, and calculate.

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 continue to be crotchety about generalism and the speed with which people think they can learn to be something (see crotchety posts here, here, and here. Here too. Oh, and here. God, do I ever stop? Well, no, but this one here isn’t grumpy.). Listening to Studio 360’s podcast about Moby-Dick today (while I was engaged in the years-long journey of becoming a better cook — in this moment by trying to improve my chicken stock and mushroom barley soup), there was a surprisingly great interview with Ray Bradbury. Why surprising? First, because, despite my love of SF and other genre fiction, I tend not to expect profundity from SF writers. Second, having never read Bradbury, I assumed whatever acclaim he gets is because of the ideas behind and the clever titling of Fahrenheit 451, not for any skill as a writer. (I need to make that right and at least buy, if not actually read, something of his on my Kindle.) Third, it’s just such a nice way of putting something I and the voices in my head are often on about that my head snapped up and I almost cut off the tip of my left index finger when he said it.

Anyway, I spend lots of time trying to convince people to respect craft and the time it takes and the value behind going deep in subject areas. But I see lots of people assuming they’re experts in things after they’ve done something once, or read a couple articles and books about it, or memorized a couple catchy phrases. Malcolm Gladwell recently helped highlight the fallacy that conversancy == expertise or that once is enough to be a guru when he highlighted the thinking that indicates you need 10,000 hours to get really good at something. But that factoid alone doesn’t quite get it across, because it’s not 10,000 accretive hours only that get you there. It’s 10,000 accretive and repetitive hours, with an emphasis on repetitive — you don’t learn new things so much as you learn more about the richness of the things you know. Describing this process and helping people understand it is challenging.

So, Bradbury wrote the screenplay/adaptation for the Gregory Peck film version of Moby Dick. (I didn’t know that, so already I’m happily smarter as I chop my leeks — working on getting more rhythm and precision and speed with my 8″ knife.) He apparently rather famously talked about being Herman Melville for a day during the writing of the screenplay and the Studio 360 host asked him to explain the why and the how of that:

what you try to do is get it into your bloodstream, get it into your unconscious. You can’t intellectualize it, that won’t work. But if you read a book 80 or 90 times, which I did, some sections I read 120 times, and you put that all into your bloodstream . . . and then you ignore it and let it come to the surface, emotionally, passionately . . . then you become the chaser and chased.

I like the image of getting it into you bloodstream and waiting for it to surface. Even more, though, I like the idea of ignoring the material and letting it sit in your unconscious.

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.

I’m getting some traffic from a few places where I’ll be speaking/visiting/workshopping next week and the most recent posts don’t make me look particularly good. So here are links to some posts which put a better face on me and might be interesting to read. And yes, of course, this screams of the need to re-design, get some WP modules, and making the thing decent again . . . meanwhile:

A revelation I had about the difference between design and creative (at least in interactive and marketing)

A curmudgeonly screed complaining about how simplistic our notions of design thinking have become.

More churlinshness about innovation and what a weasel word it is.

If your read only one (and why should you even bother with that?):

A happy post about innovation and craft and a jubilant post about that awesome young man who built the windmill in Malawi. You’re probably better off going to his site. I just wanted to counterbalance the crank with something positive.

Some thoughts on simplicity in web design, by way of tests I used to give IxD candidates interviewing for a job.

An overview of my obsession/fascination with emergent design

Several posts about craft and the XO people (additional obsessions)

I’m in the middle of several threads with friends, co-workers, former co-workers, and the voices in my head about what to do with the on-again off-again me-che (meme + cliche, pron me-SHAY) of design thinking. Having just read Designful Company with others, I felt that the book and the me-che of design thinking makes it far too easy to say we’re all deisgners, or that a couple articles will help us do design thinking. I can’t resist quoting Dr Malcolm in Jurassic Park:

I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it.

So, I’m thinking, instead of thinking about design thinking, why not learn something about design? I’m not suggesting a career change, or even a massive effort to learn some new tools or software. Rather, read some books that help people understand the DNA, rhythm, and thought patterns of a design discipline. Dig deeper into a craft and see what makes it tick.

I just love 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. It’s quite literally a whole series of things — grand and trivial, obvious and subtle — that one would learn in architecture school. And, like all great books that dive deep into a specific area of expertise, it finds universal truths or univerally useful ideas. Examples:

“Being process-oriented, not product-driven, is the most important and difficult skill for a designer to develop” — this emphasizes the importance of understanding the problem and putting the time into it, moving between concept- and detail-levels of the work, understanding the value of dead-ends and near-misses.

If you can’t explain your ideas to your grandmother in terms that she understands, you don’t know your subject well enough — emphasis mine. The ability to communicate simply and clearly is something we all praise (and that I’ve praised here) or at least give lip service to. What I love about this is that it places the onus on the person — if you can’t do it, you’re not that good at it.

A good building reveals different things about itself when viewed from different distances — much better than a big idea, how about having a rich idea?

Less is more
Less is a bore — yeah, yeah, not a news flash, but putting them on consecutive pages forces one to recognize that they are both truths and then think deeper about how and when to exercise them. Typically, we use the first to reflexively justify cutting something.

True architectural style does not come from a conscious effort to create a particular look. It results obliquely - even accidentally - out of a holistic process. — it results obliquely!

Roll your drawings for transport or storage with the image side facing bold — from the lofty to the mundane, but useful.

On the parti:

Some will argue that an ideal parti is wholly inclusive — that it informs every aspect of a building from its overall configuration and structural system to the shape of the doorknobs. others believe that a perfect parti is neither attainable nor desirable.

Music to the ears of a person who is sick of the nattering insistence on having a ‘big idea’ when designing a large, complex, rich experience.

Finally, my personal favorite, scanned directly:

Be careful of your design accents, or be careful of trying to create meaningful spaces where there aren’t any.

Love it.

For those who don’t remember the Dick Van Dyke Show (or Mary Tyler Moore before her show) or UHF:

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.

Two links today, one old, one new, highlighting how over-use, mis-use, mindless-use of the word has robbed of it meaning and impact:

From the presumably soon to be renamed “Innovate on Purpose”, a nice line about the cost of setting overstated goals: “By placing too much emphasis or spotlighting events that aren’t really innovation, we place a lot of good work at risk.” There’s another nice line that hits on the idea that innovation is a habit, “consider innovation as a repeatable, sustainable process rather than a quick brainstorm or two and one somewhat interesting product”

Scott Berkun is the author of the other, older post where he makes the ballsy statement: “Just be good. That’s hard enough.” Not only is it hard, it’s actually often innovative, better than what’s out there.