designswarm thoughts

“Always be innovatin”.

This perversion of “Always be closing” was a joke Mike and I shared as we walked down the streets of New York last January and got me thinking about the topic ever since. As the months trickled by and after working with some pretty big clients, having friends leave some of their jobs in big corporations, and attending last week’s R&D Society event on the topic of Space and R&D things started to crystallise further and I thought I’d share some quick thoughts.

1. Defining innovation is pointless

A theory of mine is that it’s easier to define when innovation is ABSENT rather than defining it ad nauseum.

“Following Schumpeter (1934), contributors to the scholarly literature on innovation typically distinguish between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully in practice. In many fields, such as the arts, economics and government policy, something new must be substantially different to be innovative. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. – says Wikipedia”

Innovation is something new and useful. That’s kindof it. Not a one-liner. Not something fluffy and useless. New. Useful.

The real challenge is exploiting that and fostering it. When it happens, you see it and you recognise it. When you can’t find it, it’s obvious (points to newspaper, publishing, music industry).

2. Corporate innovation is hard.
Start-ups are exciting. Even the EU Commission wants to be more like them according to Luis Rodriguez-Rosello, Acting Director of Directorate. In that spirit, they set up the Public-Private partnerships program (as exciting as it sounds trust me). How to become innovative is a big business, or at least look like you are. The ways in which this is actually done seems to vary according to how big your business is and your industry.

- The R&D Model.
Start an R&D department (Philips R&D is a good example or the now defunct Nokia Insight & Foresight) which is something you have to keep pushing for, ignore ROI for a while and try not to cut when the going gets tough. In the past year or so though, everyone cut R&D. Yahoo! ’s Brick House is another example that comes to mind. The challenge with this model is in valuing the work everyone else does equally even if they are not part of the “department”.

- The half-baked R&D Model
Companies who don’t officially have a space for innovation but have one or 2 people who are creative and want to do r&d. So they make them do r&d mostly but brush it aside the second client work comes in. Really dangerous as a model as the level of frustration of those people escalates rather rapidly. You’re either dedicated to the idea that people can do good new and useful things in specific conditions where they are isolated from the everyday, or not. Don’t pretend.

- The OSMOSIS Model
Buy the right people through company acquisition (Nokia bought Dopplr and the product hasn’t moved since. They wanted the team, not the product.) and try not to bore them, or make them leave when their “golden handcuffs” are off and basically strive to make the internal culture map the start-up culture they left. Really hard. No easy answers here. Can’t think of examples of that model being a successful way to change the company culture.

- The ALPHA-PERSON Model
Hire the right people (JP at BT, Adam at Nokia and Ben at SIX come to mind.). These are people who will make waves and the point is, I guess, to allow them to rock the boat, because that’s kindof why you go them there in the first place. Does that work. I suppose, only time will tell.

- The START-UP & FLIP Model
So not quite corporate but becomes corporate very quickly. Small groups with lots of ambition and a lot of coffee and some VC backing. Add salt and pepper and wait 20 minutes and whatever it is they came up with will flourish, under specific circumstances, in the right economic climate, with the right backer, etc. Hard stuff but obviously a successful model of “innovation” that places like TechHub in London are attempting to support. If, as the E-myth goes, 80% of SMEs fail in the first 2 years, and 80% of that 20% fail in the subsequent years, you do the numbers. Saul Klein’s presentation on this topic from back in 2008 is very good.

3. So what?
It’s hard to be innovative and I personally think that the innovative stuff I see around me come from small companies with financial independence, lots of personalities and tons of ideas they bother to write about, blog about and express through their work. To build up innovation as a core value of your organisation is hard but worth doing. Apparently when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he killed all R&D. If it was new and useless, why spend the money right? New. Useful. That’s it.

PS: I might expand on the win conditions in small businesses next time, as this will do for a Saturday in the office :)

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

- Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt)

A recommendation from David , I’m very grateful to have found this book. Such precise and preciously rich writing. Intellectual truffles.

Page 4: “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?”

Page 36: “His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in a correct and acceptable fashion”

Page 44: “Of course, he wrote something like, How do you manage to live with such fog? By the time a gentleman has recognised a lady as she comes at him out of the fog, it is already too late to raise his hat. I’m surprised the race doesn’t die out when such conditions make difficult such courtesies”

Page 71: “One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, it to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.”

I got this last month from Michel, a lovely student from Eindhoven:

“I am currently looking for an internship in HCI/ID, but I am suffering from a “typecasting”-effect. Many companies ask for “interaction designers” when they really mean “graphics designers” or “css monkeys”. The fact that I have a background in computer science just makes things worse by adding “programmer” to the list of stigmas. My interests lie in the more physical kinds of interaction, but it’s really hard to find the right positions for that. Do you have any advice as to how I might better find the right places? Any help would be greatly appreciated!”

This felt deeply familiar of course as when I graduated in 2006 and it was a problem even then (I ended up working as a visual designer / information architect for a year even if my portfolio of work was much more product-based).

I try to explain to people what an interaction designer is in the way that I understand it, and in the context of the business I built, it makes sense. But in isolation, it no longer means anything on the market. Physical computing is too embedded in academia and is starting to feel old. Bill Verplank had suggested Physical Interaction Design, but it sounds a little clunky. So should we be concerned by this? As per Michel’s email, i think so. Graduates become senior designers, strategists, creative directors, etc. rarely interaction designers.

Lack of terminology ultimately leads to lack of identity and the dilution of a field into the market, unnoticed. Something to think about for the start of the week :)

Last month, Carole invited me to come in, lecture and help her graduating MA Textile Futures students understand the value of building an online presence of their own. I ended up putting together a few presentations to explain the value of what the internet was about, how it could help them in their career, etc. I learnt a lot and observed a lot along the way. Some of it shocked me, some of it are service ideas that are just screaming to happen and I thought I’d share. Feel free to reap the benefits :)

It’s 2010. The golden age of technology right? Well, managing an online presence, understanding what it’s all for when you’re not a web designer or involved in web design or “social media”, turns out to be more obscure than in 2005. Let me explain.

In 2003, I took a Flash class in my product design course. Horrible, obscure stuff where the end result was a Flash website. Need I say more? In 2005, half way through my master’s in IDII, I learnt how to code my own website (thanks to the many hours I spent with Didier who had the patience to teach me HTML & CSS). The year after that Yaniv made it compulsory to use Wordpress to communicate our progress in our thesis work. I still find PHP a horrible thing to understand, but the hours spent paid off eventually. I moved on to being Karola’s sysadmin and web designer (I get jewellery in return you see) which keeps me coding once in a while. So all in all, that’s 5 years worth of investment that unless you’re in a “media” course of some sort, you’ll never encounter. This is a problem.

1. The internet’s ultimate designer package.
Most students will access the internet to have access to particular social communities (FB, Twitter, etc), do google searches for images and check email. They have no real understanding about the value of having their own URL (nevermind that they don’t know what URL means) until you ask them to Google themselves. Then they get it. If there’s a business idea here, its a packaged “registration, hosting and wordpress/tumblr/whatever installation” package. Having that will compete and just eat up horrible sites like indexhibit.org (i don’t even want to link to them) to stop taking advantage of creative people who just want a “box” to put images and captions in. Designers want to worry about the right things, want some degree of personalisation and want to get on with the business of designing quickly.

2. Ignorance is not bliss.
Reliance on “IT support” is strong in the creative industries. This means the IT sector takes the piss and doesn’t educate designers. There is no knowledge exchange, there are only service providers who make designers totally dependant. Explaining to a designer what FTP is, getting them to write their first index.html page and upload it and see it there, means they can then understand what happens behind the curtain and can have a creative discussion about it. Again, not talking about anyone involved in the “new media” sector but everyone else, photographers, textile designers, product designers, etc. Some of the women I spoke to about this (was an all-women course) were amazed and happy to build a vocabulary that made that world of acronyms make more sense.

3. Portfolio communities are horrible.
One of the missconceptions of design graduates, is that shoving their work into online communities for other designers will help them build a voice online. Looking at my own experience, when I graduated from product design school, core77 and if you were a bit cool, Computer Love or if you were really cool K10K were the places to go. What changed soon after that, was that your best friend online became Google and the blogs that linked to the work ( think WMMNA, Cool Hunting, Swissmiss or Mocoloco). In 2010, well it’s partially about Twitter love, but still very much about Google, not about walled gardens but about rich networks of relationships.

4. Flickr’s golden opportunity.
I just spent the day with Karola rethinking her website, and in the end, we found that it was easier to ask her to update Flickr and for her website to just link to slideshows of work. She understands HTML because I bullied her into it ;) , but she’s obviously now much more active and at ease thinking about Flickr, managing an image around her work, and thinking about the power of imagery. So we redesigned her website to basically end up being a “wrapper” around Flickr sets. It’s not Flickr, so she feels its her own space. If you Google her, you’ll get her website first, which is what she wants, but all the assets end up living elsewhere, in a space she’s happy to manage and where customer support is easy to handle through commenting. If Flickr was interested in monetizing at all, this I think would be a nice way to do it.

5. Education
In the end, I was happy to come and talk to the students about this, because noone had really bothered to give me such an introduction when I was a student. I’m not sure to what extent this shouldn’t become a compulsory module for design course “Online identity management” as so much of our work as professionals relies on promoting our work as much as possible, and this isn’t only through publications in magazines anymore. With the recent cuts in education, I doubt this idea will have any traction, but hey, that’s my 10 cents.

Two thoughts late in the evening as I continue to think about what makes paper different. Not better or worse, just different from pixels.

1. I bought this month’s Wired UK as I’m a sucker for a cup of earl grey and a read and right in the middle of it, there was a perfume sample ( l’Eau d’Issey pour hommes) and that made me happy. I like sticking my nose and inhaling a little portion of an experience someone is trying to sell me. It works because I can try it without buying it. It works because it gets me to stick my nose to a piece of paper. Totally strange gesture which, as women, you are invited to do all the time. To the extent that I’m sure most women know what glossy paper smells like. There’s something there.

2. I’m reading another Duras at the moment. And I like showing off that I’m reading in a foreign language. It’s a peacock behaviour of course. Will pixels help with that at all? Where can we show off now that everyone and their chav cousin has an iPhone, soon an iPad?

Someone should update this surely.

Are great for cleaning and organising.

I don’t consider myself an early adopter by any stretch of the imagination, mostly because I can afford to be as my close friends are. By proxy, I get to hear about how cool the coolest things are and make a purchasing decision several months or years down the line if ever (in the case of second hand tech). In the case of Foursquare, I’d been hearing about it and Dodgeball for _years_ so when I started using it on my trusty BB in March, I thought this was all old hat and was, as usual sceptical. I have to say it’s changed my opinion of a few things but also makes me think about others.

GAMES
If you’ve never used Foursquare, it’s easy: you “check-in” in places and get points according to how often you check-in in a day, how far each check-in is made from the last and how often you check-in to each location. This leads to all sorts of things like you become “mayor” if you go there often enough and depending on how popular the place. I became mayor of 5 places in less than 2 months of “playing”. Some of these places, it was simply awarded after having gone there twice. Others took more work. I hadn’t played a “game” in years and I found that I looked forward to seeing how many points I’d won. There didn’t need to be an arch or grand narrative of why I was getting all these points, and I hardly visited the online infoviz bit. The points were enough to keep me entertained and that was good enough.

PRESENCE vs _PRESENCE_
All in all, probably about 3 to 4 of my friends used Foursquare regularly and they’re really good friends. I found myself however, mistaking the fact that I could see where they went with real contact. I had coffee with them less, talked to them about what they did less and generally was less social during that time. Strange, it’s like feeling awake from looking at the picture of a cup of coffee. Do we emulate the sense of social presence through these games, online services and communities, without any action needed on our part and just a passive action on the part of the other.

WOMEN vs MEN
I like print on weekends. So when the Guardian had a massive double spread article called “Is Foursquare the New Twitter” (funnily enough the title in print is “Is Friend-stalking the new Twitter”) I was intrigued of course. Much to my surprise, they managed to squeeze in this piece of terrible pseudo-science:

There is, according to Dunbar’s research, a marked gender difference in the way that we use social media. It is, in this respect, not surprising that the early take-up of the geo-location sites is weighted toward men. “To avoid relationship decay among friends, men have to do stuff together, for women it is enough to chat.” The real-world slant of Foursquare and Gowalla make them natural vehicles for male bonding. Added to that is the opportunity for peacocking with their mobile phones, which have, to the evolutionary biologist, become a substitute for sexual display (men will always put their phone on the table and fiddle with it, women tend to keep theirs in their bag…).

I’m not even going to start ranting about the bits of this that I don’t like. All I can say is by these standards, I’ve turned into a man. Ridiculous.

So all in all, it was an interesting experiment. I’ve stopped using it for about a week now and I the only thing I regret is the knowledge that I’ve lost the mayorship of my favorite lunch place to some of my friends who work in the same area. Made me wish for an automated system that just checked in on my behalf and played the game without my intervention. Just keeping my kingdom alive for me, letting me get on with the social things in life.

I’m in Austin for the geek version of spring break. I had some ribs. I can’t move anymore.

Highlarious. Thanks Megan and BERG, made my day.

“the Canadian economy will remain vulnerable to cyclical downturns in commodity prices (forestry is one current example); firms and people will move to more dynamic regions; and wealth generation is dampened” say these people.

Nothing like post-hockey victory kicking.

Read one of Wired Uk’s 20 ideas worth considering for 2010 and one of them caught my eye. Clive Thomson reported on ideas from the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age and I can’t help but think that we have naturally adapted to what we so often call “information overload” in a way that doesn’t require us to design for forgetting.

One of my theories is that we’ve built up the internet as a way of finding rather than as a way of remembering, naturally allowing us to forget most of it. Digital stacks of papers and bookshelves. We’ve built up the equivalent behavior of “oh I’m sure it’s in that pile”. Digital synapses dying every day.

Just as an example, here are some things I do now as ways of forgetting:

- Use Delicious to store rather than as a reference point. I rarely look at my own bookmarks.
- Not actually remembering where a link came from, but who tweeted it instead.
- Check RSS feeds in a “watching TV”-like trance: I just click through the channels and stop on the stuff that visually catches my eye. I open my RSS reader once a week at best, and the stuff that’s at the top gets read, the rest kindof gets ignored.

We have more ways of archiving than ever but that doesn’t mean we’re interested in that archive. I was a guest lecturer last month in a design school and was shocked to find that most of the research students were pulling out was from the past 3 years at most.

Archiving doesn’t have the same qualities as a library quite yet. Maybe that’s a design opportunity, or maybe the FluidData metaphor needs to be reexamined.

In any case, I think we’re better at forgetting now than we used to and that has raised the profile of “knowledge” and “opinion” over “information” (also probably explains why blogging is not quite a dead art). The people who take the time to remember will rule us all. The rest of us, will rely on our “devices” and Google.

There are things about this type of criticism that makes me cringe. Things about this, that makes me feel like I’m not included in the city experience in the same way as my more testosterone-driven peers and that the entire point made in this article was obstructed by one simple statement:
“The next day I received an email from my, far more organised, girlfriend”.

Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender.

There. I feel better.

Stuff I’ve noticed is happening as I slowly crawl towards my 30s:

- Chocolate isn’t that great anymore. It’s still nice, but not as a snack, in the middle of the day or milky. And brownies are gross.

- Grey hair appears on pictures more clearly.

- Bullshit meter is at its most efficient.

- I’m less and less patient, and I was never patient to begin with.

- Spending an evening with a cup of tea and the internet seems like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a Saturday night.

- Living with housemates is for “young people”.

- Nostalgia sets in as a permanent state of mind. “In my days” is sometimes the start of a sentence. Not often. Just sometimes.

Shit.