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.

Nicholas Carr blogs about Eric Schmidt’s evolving thinking about whether Google Makes Us Stupid. Carr wrote the Atlantic article that asked that question. Schmidt initially dismissed it out of hand, but seems to be wondering . . .

Darren Barefoot turns out to be even more skeptical than I am of the iPad — arguing that it doesn’t even make a good web browsing appliance. (Which is a fair point . . . I see its value for, and will buy one based on, for the scenario of managing my inbox and looking stuff up while I watch TV — Barefoot points out that mine is a very narrow use case.)

Scott Berkun posts Woody Guthrie’s approach to New Year’s Resolutions.

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)

Great story about a 14 yr old boy in Malawi who, unable to afford school, gets his hands on books about windmills and electricity, and then makes windmills that power his house, charge people’s phones and transform the world around him.

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.

Nice cartoon by Tom Fishburne:

Featured in his bid to speak at SxSW this year.

I’m quickly realizing that, in the context of my work as an interactive soul, I am a design thinker rather than a creative thinker. Really, I should say that I’m a designer and not a creative, but, given the way interactive marketing and advertising fetishizes the word creative (it’s a noun and a verb! it has BIG ideas!), I am afraid to relinquish the possibility of me participating in that word, even in a poorly-trafficed blog.

- Designers care about and enjoy how, creatives are bored by implementation

- Designers think god is in the details, creatives think the devil is

- Designers think about duration, durability, emergence, and long arcs of emotion; creatives think about the high, quick burst spikes of emotion

- Dare I say it: Designers care about foreplay and the afterward; Creatives focus on orgasms (seems like a way to show that I care about and understand sex as a motivator and maintain cred as at least a faux-creative)

- Designers are persistent, incurable foxes; Creatives are serial hedgehogs (See below for fox/hedgehog backgorund)

Different modes, different ways. I am almost at peace with this.

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Fox and Hedgehog

from Isaiah Berlin’s essay, “The Fox and the Hedgehog“:

there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms which they understand, think and feel … and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way … these last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal than than centripetal

the first is hedgehog (creatives), the second is the fox (designers)

David Brooks has a piece in the NYTimes a couple days ago about the origins of genius. (I originally called his piece a post, interesting.) It’s a semi-familiar construction. Genius is not a product of genes, divine inspiration, the presence of muses, but the outcome of a set of very human and, possibly replicable, factors: practice, focus, practice, a mentor, practice, and some kind of drive.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

Brooks really drills into the prosaic side of things.

By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

Then our young writer would find a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. By now she is redoing problems — how do I get characters into a room — dozens and dozens of times. She is ingraining habits of thought she can call upon in order to understand or solve future problems.

The primary trait she possesses is not some mysterious genius. It’s the ability to develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine.

What’s interesting here is the new balance being emphasized around memory. On the one hand, the whole point of 10,000 hours is to ingrain into people a cellular understanding and memory of points of execution and technique about the craft — a foundation that puts the small stuff aside and allows for a focus on the big stuff. However, there needs to be some block against “automatization”, the process through which all our 10,000 hours do is make something very complex rote. (This reminds me of that kid who played drums on large empty buckets in the Times Square subway stations. He had an awe-some speed, power, and technique but the experience was kind of eerie cuz he wasn’t really playing music or drumming.) A mentor plays a role in this — Gladwell and the authors cited in Brooks’s piece argue — of course.

Still, one has to wonder, given the number of times hyped-up parents have worked their kids hard at something and gone through dozens of teachers — in Manhattan alone — why these geniuses are still so singular. Given the increase in the sheer number of times talent is put into this formula of mentor, practice, focus, if it truly were a formula we should have many more geniuses.

In any case, as always, I’m thrilled to hear yet another argument that you get good at something — not through magic, the arrangement of desks, the optimal number of people at a brainstorm, this technique or that — but through hard work that makes you look deep, long, and broad at your craft.

Following a blog post from Collision Detection I downloaded my entire twitter history (I think it was entire . . . I seem to have fewer sober tweets than I remember). For the most part, I am every bit as banal as the recent twitter spoof, but I like to think it’s my own banality. Some highlights . . .

My first tweet, apparently: “frustrated about not being able to start assassin’s creed in earnest. next weekend perhaps.”

a revelation: after 20 years, I am finally grokking Potato Head Blues
one of many WoW tweets: nohing says xmas like fireworks @ Ironforge

literary pretentions: bought the new “war and peace” will start tonight, if I can get it home

spending superbowl weekend with the XO instead of the US male population: dissecting the XO, deep dive into design
almost healthy: XO, piano, . . . gym??!?!
intrigued by the XO, getting ready to muck with wordpress theme-dom
my first hour or so with the XO http://flickr.com/photos/ki… dig it. i want a new career

upside of not watching the superbowl: i will be four hours ahead of the rest o the world. an advantage that will fade quickly

a string of quoting Yogi tea when I had pneumonia: Your breath is the voice of your soul — Yogi Tea

literary pretentia that brought out some very supportive friends @chapinc: experiencing the worst ache: wanting to read part of a favorite book and then not being able to find it. in this case, The Information

literary pretentia . . . a-GAIN: fiction rocks. i forgot

gadgetry and photography: apple tv + iphoto + hdtv makes me a great photographer

office humor: Toby makes me want to act like less nessman

my obsession with t-shaped people: getting ready to read Sennett’s The Craftsman. I smell the winds of a generalist backlash (interestingly the book wound up being thoroughly unquotable and yielded no powerpoint slides

all manner of pretentia: worried that i have the cpu but not the ram for real literature

at least, powerful social commentary: watching a prominent neurologist justify a catscan to an insurance hack.

quick reversion to form: I am homesick for Elwynn Forest. It’s been months. (That’s a WoW reference. My main came up in Elwynn Forest)

and staying on form: someone just asked my about the XO in a casual email. poor woman got inundated with my xo rants http://tinyurl.com/4vcoh8

lemming-like literary pretentia, disguised as self-effacement: dilemma: McSweeneys is a cliche in Juno, but Eggers won the TED prize. What do I do? Think for myself? :-0

ooh, daring: i no longer do the Sunday NYT crossword zippily . . . which of us is out of touch?

i love my kindle jokes: doh!: my book ran out of battery power on the train

see?: turning off my book before takeoff! (I will never tire of this gag)

election sickness, with a touch of Batman dialogue: spending way too much morning time looking at voting maps. must. stop. obsessing.

I also enjoy stupid facebook friend jokes: feeling proud: neither Mahler nor Kundera are willing to face me at the chessboard

generic pretentia: porch with dog, chess board, cigar and scotch

get over it already: for the record: flushing out == hunting term (bird dogs FLUSH out birds)(discovery), fleshing out == adding to a skeleton (additive)

I get my flying mount inWoW: at long last, I can fly! http://tinyurl.com/3sj4yp

word love (aka pretentia): Amazon Nownow reminds: one is a real troUper when one perseveres in the face of difficulty, not a real trooper. But common usage will win

doing something illegal: bluesy, blousy, baked, and bopping

double layer of pop culture influence: thinkin on the “difference between the professional and the dilettante” . . . — character from NCIS, gods help me

strange concatenation, but you gotta admit the food thing is annoying: digging jenny holzer tweets and wondering why TV eating continuity is so bad . . . I mean why bother having them eat if it’s gonna be bad

long-standing theme of white boy who really wants to understand, but only if he can quickly buy his way to it: looking for a support group for people who buy embarassing iTunes essential lists (and don’t hide them well)

musical counter pretentia, which is its own pretentia: “everybody’s dancing in the headlights, and in the headlights you can hear them singing” I miss mojo nixon

this is as close to true self-awareness as I achieve on twitter: “the beat goes on/and I’m so wrong”. I miss Zappa

jealous of other men’s good looks: hastens to remind people that don draper wet himself in the war

still compensating four tweets later: With kindle you can read jane Austen otw to work, and sabermetrics on way to shea

the inner queen comes out: .. so long ‘La Vie Boheme’

just like this one: “insatiable vicariousness” - haven’t grokked it yet, but seems valuable.

a series of tweets about the stupid grin on my face after election day that left my face sore: Scratch that. I’m smiling like an idiot at everything.

impromptu work party on the Acela (and third reference to booze in this post): Echolon and jim beam bottles on the acela.

more pop culture references: “we call it ‘embracing the suck’” — The Unit

and, lastly, my own version of is there anything more sublime?: cohiba habano + walker blue + big dog + shcubert + backyard garden == la w00t^2

HSCU == “hot sake cold unagi”

From someone who recently re-read Politics and the English Language:

In reference to the not unknown work by Orwell that you had previously referenced, I felt it incumbent in this particular instance to not as we might say - toe the line - and relay my experience of the aforementioned work despite the fact of not having been previously unaware of it’s contents, I found the value of it to not be particularly non-valuable; Indeed, it was a work that I might consider to share with colleagues, given ample opportunity to do so, as well, and indeed, one that I am already implementing in my daily work experience, as this email of which you are reading, I think can testify, in and of itself.

Let’s regroup, turbanize, and proceed forward.

Cheers,