Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects — even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”
Also worth mentioning Clive Grinyer on the Democratisation Of Design which was recorded at TEDxLeeds but the videos are not available yet.
I know what Umair Haque is getting at in his Awesomeness Manifesto. Innovation is over used and most of the time treasured over all else but I'm concerned about some of Umair's examples to tell the truth.
Innovation often isn't. Innovation means, naively, what is commercially novel. Yet, as the financial crisis proves, what is “innovative” is often value destructive and socially harmful. Financial “innovation” turned out to be unnovative: it has destroyed trillions in value – here are some staggering estimates from the IMF.
It's time to ask: have the costs of innovation exceeded the benefits?
A better concept, one built for a radically interdependent 21st century, is awesomeness. Here are the four pillars of awesomeness:
Ethical production. Innovation turns a blind eye to ethics — or, worse, actively denies ethics. That's a natural result of putting entrepreneurship above all. Buy low, sell high, create value. That's so 20th century. Awesome stuff is produced ethically — in fact, without an ethical component, awesomeness isn't possible. Starbucks is shifting to Fair Trade coffee beans, for example. Why? Starbucks isn't just trying to innovate yet another flavour of sugar-water: it's trying to gain awesomeness.
Insanely great stuff. What is innovative often fails to delight, inspire, and enlighten — because, as we've discussed, innovation is less concerned with raw creativity. Awesomeness puts creativity front and center. Awesome stuff evokes an emotive reaction because it's fundamentally new, unexpected, and 1000x better. Just ask Steve Jobs. The iPhone and iPod were pooh-poohed by analysts, who questioned how innovative they really were — but the Steve has turned multiple industries upside down through the power of awesomeness.
Love. You know what's funny about walking into an Apple Store? The people working there care. They don't just “work at the Apple store” — they love Apple. Contrast that with the alienating, soul-crushing experience of trying to buy something at Best Buy — where salespeople attack you out of greed. (Or, as editor extraordinaire Sarah Green put it, “where you wander around for a full half-hour unable to find anyone to help you before you finally get the attention of some blue-shirted 12-year old who turns out to know nothing about the products she sells and ultimately end up committing hara-kiri with a Wii controller”). Their goal is to sell; the goal of Apple Store employees is simply to show off their awesomeness, and let you share it. Love for what we do is the basis of all real value creation.
Thick value. It's the most hackneyed phrase in the corporate lexicon: adding value. Let's face it: most value is an illusion. Nokia, Motorola, and Sony tried for a decade to “add value” to their phones — yet not a single feature did. Food producers and pharmaceutical companies claim they're “adding value,” but mostly they're just mega-marketing.
The vast majority of companies — in my research, greater than 95% — can only create what I have termed thin value. Thick value is real, meaningful, and sustainable. It happens by making people authentically better off — not merely by adding more bells and whistles that your boss might like, but that cause customers to roll their eyes.
I personally think the Apple store example is a mistake, they are there to sell and you'd be a fool to think otherwise. Yes its very different from the experience of going into Best buy but is it any different from going into Nike Town, Lush or most places? Awesomeness its not, actually I'd put Ikea in the position of Awesomeness. They lay the stuff out and you go around pick what you want, no pressure, no sale assistance just a warehouse of stuff with some gentle hints here and there. Now thats a awesome retail experience when it was unleashed on the public over 10 years ago.
Let's summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That's a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.
I've talked to many boardrooms about awesomeness. Beancounters feel challenged and threatened by it, because it feels fuzzy and imprecise. Yet, it's anything but. Gen M knows “awesomeness” when we see it — that's why its part of our vernacular. It's a precise concept, with meaning, depth, and resonance.
What makes some stuff awesome and other stuff merely (yawn) innovative? I've outlined my answers, but they're far from the best, or even the only ones — so add your own thoughts in the comments.
You might be innovative — but are you awesome? For most, the answer is: no. Game over: in the 21st century, if you're merely innovative, prepare to be disrupted by awesomeness.
So awesomeness sounds a lot like wuffie or social capital. All of them make beancounters feel challenged and threatened natrually because of the lack of solid metric? I wonder if in the same way you can claim to be doing awesomeness. Instead other people tell you your doing awesome work? Oh by the way Awesome photo by the way Kulafire.
TEDxLeeds happened this week at the Rosebowl in Leeds city centre. Like TEDxLiverpool, the whole event was on a day with plenty of sunshine, Imran Ali had planned a event starting from 5pm – 9pm, as maybe not to interfer with those leaving work or wanting to enjoy the last throws of summer. Anyway, about 120-150 people turned up to enjoy the evening. And enjoy the evening we did.
After the begals and coffee, we entered the lecture theatre with short legroom and the event was under way. A slightly nervous and softly spoken Imran Ali kicked off the event with the talk from Chris Anderson welcoming everyone to TEDx. I wasn't sure if he was actually nervous or conserving his energy for later. The now famous Herb Kim joined the introduction and before you knew it we were into the excellent TEDtalk from Kevin Kelly on next 5000 days of the web.. Although a long talk, it was funny and entertaining enough to keep everyone on track.
The first live talk was the fantastic Dr Norman Lewis, who made the point that all research and development labs are deeply lacking in ambition and innovation. Very hard and cutting stuff but actually he was right. We went to moon 40 years ago but where have we been since? Where's our ambition to truly solve the worlds problems?
After break and a short emoticon TEDtalk video, Charles Cecil talked about rebuilding the relationship with the games buying market. The take away was that a lot of the lessons we'd learned in the web world can and should be applied the world of games and play. After another break and a another good TEDtalk video choice about how design can up the circulation of newspapers.
On came Clive Grinyer on the Democratisation Of Design. A very thought provoking talk and to be honest did get me going at points. There was a section about superstar designers which had me almost spitting blood. Can't stand the idea of superstar designers. This is why I found objectified so ummmm frustrating in parts. But then he talked about design as function and process, and showed a example of a redesigned prison to encourage people not to reoffend. In the end, the point of Clive's talk was all about design being too important for it to be left with designers. Or as he puts it nothing is too small to be designed.
After the event we all headed over to Ha Ha bar for social drinks (thanks Herb and Marrisa). TEDxLeeds had some great speakers and it all went pretty smoothly, good work imran, ntileeds and codeworks. I'm going to miss out on the next two TEDxNorth's (sheffield and Newcastle) due to work on TEDxManchester which is looking to be a big event to end the TEDxNorth 2009 season.
I love these internet manifesto meme's specially when they come from collaborations with people you know/met. This one is from a bunch of German bloggers commenting on how journalism has changed, a couple of the bloggers I've met at Next09, Web2.0 and BarCampBerlin's. Its been translated from German by Jenna and of course there's lot more reason on the main site.
Everything I'd experienced and guessed about motivating people around out of the box problems is sumed up perfectly in this delightful talk by Dan Pink at TED Global. Its stunning to hear how much of no brainer this all is, but how the disconnect still challenges most companies.
Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.
I didn't blog Twitter's Ten Rules for Radical Innovators (found via @adew), because I think it was about the time of my blog being down. Umair Haque describes across 10 points why Twitter is changing the way we not only communicate but also innovate. Following the last blog post its good to point out that this is another reason why its critical that one company isn't going to rule this field no matter what their indentations may be at the time.
Interestingly the rules are actually good enough almost by themselves to create all types of dialogue around. We actually have a copy printed out on our wall in work. The Video above is Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque at the Next09 conference, where they talk about the money side of all this.
TEDx Liverpool happened yesterday (Aug 7th) at Liverpool's ICDC. Being the first one of five is no mean feat but the TEDx Liverpool team pulled it off nicely. The line up included Steve Clayton from Microsoft, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker.it and Alison Gow from Liverpool's Daily Post. The concept of TEDx is that there are live speakers crossed with pre-recorded talks from the real TED events. The choice of videos was good and mixed well with the live speakers, I did wonder if it would work as smoothly but it did. I would say there was about 100+ people at the event, but a lot of people did drop out for one reason or another. So anyway the friendly challenge of one upping each other is off to a great start. I took some nice pictures of the event.
Everyone is loving Prezi, people are totally raving about it. But I have serious problems with the technology behind Prezi.
As far as I can tell Prezi generates a huge flash file which is bad enough but on top of that is it seems to suck everything into it and nothing much seems to come out. So for example it can injest pdf file, images, text, movies, etc. But can you export to a presentation file which people can take away? Can you export to a printable for format? Can you export to a movie? It doesn't seem very clear from any of the information I have seen. In actual fact you can only export to a format which requires another Prezi player, to play it back! The business model is also worth mentioning, 119 dollars a month for version which includes offline editing but not much else. All the payment grades are tied to there online storage too, which is very expensive for what you get. For example how would you pay for 2gig of storage? Certainly no where up from 30 dollars, which still assumes the offline editor is worth 90 dollars. From a Data Portability angle this is like the spawn of satan surely? And I'm sure from a open source and free software angle, this has got to have Tim Oreilly and Richard Stallman in chills at night? Lastly, what on earth are TED thinking sponsoring this stuff?
I have been thinking maybe some enterprising group of people could take the SVG specification and build a tool which generates these exact same presentations. So first up you can use scripts on every element including the viewpoint attribute. There seems to be a load of things you can do with the Canvas coordinate system. SVG 1.1 has the ability to embed certain multimedia but SVG Foreign Object could be used to place a browser or a complete video within a SVG.
You could imagine a specially made tool which worked like Prezi but wouldn't need to be propitery and locked in. They could even create and sell a player and editor backed with its online space, so the business model isn't totally shattered. Even if a rival tried to create the same, OpenPrezi as I'm coining it would be first to the market and have a wealth of knowledge of what works and what doesn't. Even a track record might go down well. So in my mind, there's no way I will be using Prezi till its a lot more open. I'm sure even I could with a bit of time construct something using the SVG methods I mentioned. I'm not questioning the method or even the concept, it actually reminds me of mood boards. Its the implementation which winds me up.
TEDx North has gone live, and if your playing catch up its a combination of 5 different TEDx (x being independently run) events.
Each event will have excellent live speakers and previous TEDtalks. They promise to bring you a taste of TED without the huge cost and long waiting list.
I’m happy to say the BBC’s famous Studio 7 will also host TEDxManchester on the 2nd October. We have room for 100’s of people, so it should be one of the biggest events and a great end to the series of collaborative events. We've teamed up with FutureEverything and
There are upcoming TEDx's in the south, midlands, scotland and of course the rest of the world too.
Unlike others I don't have a real relationship with TED, I actually experienced Pop!Tech before TED because they would put there shows on IT Conversations.com for anyone to download and listen to. Then Pop!Tech started streaming there conference to the world. I remember getting it working on my XBMC xbox at one point. Pop!tech never felt as elitist as TED and Thinking Digital was doing great things for the UK but none of them were of them quite moved into the exciting decentralised mode of barcamp. I had noticed a small break away conference called BIL which I had considered putting on in the UK, because it was more fitting with the barcamp philosophy. But Herb Kim asked me if I'd like to run TEDxManchester pretty soon after the recent Thinking Digital. So after a look into TEDx, I agreed and the rest is history as they say.
I have already given the Windows Mobile App Store the thumbs down and put the boot into the Apple App store. So its clear I believe there a fad and other factors will take over very soon.
What's reassuring is that Google also see the problems with App stores and in this interview with FT.com found via Jyri, they describe the problem. Boiled down to a sentence, the web is the platform.
Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.
Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, (pictured centre) told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.
“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”
Mr Gundotra won some support from the rest of the panel. Michael Abbott, head of application software for Palm, said advances in the browser being introduced through HTML5 standards meant that web applications could tap features of particular phones such as their accelerometers.
Once again I need to give some credit to Chris Messina for waking me up to the fact that the web has won. Google and Palm have also put out products and services which operate on this fact. And today at a presentation from Aza Ruskin, I quized him about Ubiquity and the notion of browser vs the OS. I didn't push hard or even mention Google Chrome OS but he came back to me with a lot of interesting thoughts about barriers around personal content rather that a barrier between online and offline content. Would have liked to have explored but it was clear that Aza Ruskin was also talking like the web had won.
