Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
We rightly understand that how we arrange atoms is more important than what atoms we use. Same with information. The arrangement is more important than the ingredients.
I'm quite fond of saying that traditional architects organize physical space to enable better wayfinding and allow for certain kinds of movement through space; information artists organize information to enable better decisions and certain kinds of thinking. This is "human programming."
Thad Starner is one of several pioneers who have been personally experimenting with continuous visual input devices, sometime called wearable computing. To most people it looks like he has a screen attached to his eyeball. Starner wore his for years (as has others like Steve Mann, who started doing this earlier). They are living the dream/nightmare of being on the web 24/7, even while walking. So what is it like?
The main question: If your brain is connected to the internet, can you think of anything else? Michael Chorost interviewed Starner (below) in World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet, p.142,160) As far as I can tell, research with the population at large to date suggests that our ability to multitask is not as great as we think it is. In other worlds, when we multitask we do less well on more tasks. When Chorost asked him about this, Starner makes an interesting counter claim:
Starner replied that he multiplexes rather than multitasks. Multiplexing means doing tasks that reinforce each other. For him, taking notes and having conversations are tasks that parallel and enrich each other. They are multiplexed. On the other hand, he doesn't try to manage email during a conversation or while walking down the street. That would be multitasking. "If the wearable task is directly related to the conversation, the the user's attention is not 'split' and multiplexing can be pretty effective."
As Thad Starner explained to me, distraction can be avoided by multiplexing rather than multitasking.... We have no difficulty absorbing all at once the music of a parade, the sight of uniformed marchers, bright sunlight, an autumn breeze, a pain in one's knee, the smell and taste of hot dogs, and the clasp of a loved ones's hand.
I can think of other multiplexing combinations like driving a car while auditing to a book. In theory this should not work. How can you read and drive at the same time? I know that when I am listening to an audible book I am totally engaged. If it is a great book, I am transported to that world 100%. I would think my conscious mind would not be capable of doing anything else. Yet, I am pretty sure that my driving while listening to books is very safe. I must be multiplexing the two actions, though I don't know what synergy they have. There seems to be some non-rival part of my brain that takes over the driving. That part of my brain has been driving for many years, and it has also been driving *while listening to books* for almost 30 years! (Zero accidents so far.) Both are fairly high-order tasks. I haven't researched the science on auditing while driving so I don't know if I am merely fooling myself, but it sure feels like multiplexing to me.
We can listen to music while cooking. Some folks do bills while watching TV. There may be other multiplexing combinations I don't know about. Is there an example of multiplexing you do?
Originally posted in The Technium
The recently opened Adobe Museum of Digital Media — an entirely online institution — has now begun to feature exhibitions that highlight the impact of digital media on culture and design. Soon to open is an exhibit from John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, featuring Arts + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC) an exploration of how relationships between the physical and the digital can create art.
During an exhibition preview shown within the virtual museum, Maeda explained that:
Computers let us imagine digitally what we once could only validate by handcraft in physical form [...] the infinite malleability and reusability of bits have forever changed the creative process. But […] digital tools have relied on many of the original tools and media used by artists in the pre-digital world.
Hosted by a leading thinker in the design world, the experience of viewing this kind of exhibit is supposed to make us think further about what it means to place in a work in a museum, virtual or not, and what that positioning will mean as designers begin to craft digital experiences rather than physical ones. We would normally embed a video preview here in this post, but there’s something to be said for having the imposed limitation of having to experience this exhibit within a specific online space — just as though you were actually walking through the delineated space a real building. It’s a bit counterintuitive in a world where links and videos are shared and distributed freely. But perhaps it’s the classification itself of the experience as a museum exhibition that gives the designers a framework for creating new kinds of digital experiences and social meeting grounds.
[via designboom]
A bit of expanded thought on the above:
I grew up with the idea burned into my head that you can't force anyone to think anything, that ultimately people are responsible for themselves. The subtext of the idea is that try as you might, if someone is making a bad decision, you have to let them make it, and they will learn from it.
On a certain level that's something I still believe, but I've since revised the scope of the idea to something like "you can't *directly* make people think anything." I've started to understand that what you *can* do instead is create environments within which only certain kinds of decisions are made.
A quick lateral jump: some of you may be familiar with the National Forensic League's policy/cross-examination debate, most known to those familiar with high school debate competitions. Within these structured debates, of the handful of methods of attack that one may employ against their opponent, the point of definition is generally considered the most base and least substantive. I get the sense this sentiment carries to the public in general ("you're just arguing over semantics").
I say all that because I consider classification to be one of the key methods of creating cognitive environments. Which is an abstract way of saying that names and definitions are seemingly superfluous but in fact they change everything. They have the power to shatter cultural conventions, as I allude to in the article above, drawing on the way people think about the difference between websites and museums.
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
