Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
"The right art ", cried the Master, `is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
Part of the direct / indirect metaphor I like to employ
Take a look at the video below from Gracenote and you will see an application to select music by mood.
It’s an interesting idea and mood is something you see being played with by all kinds of designers from cars to hotel rooms. The idea of giving the user the opportunity to customize the experience according to mood seems like a viable idea from a design perspective.
However, I am a little skeptical about this because we seem to have a pretty good idea of how to deal with our own moods without fancy technology guessing or getting in the way.
The idea of automated mood selection seems too rigid and takes us to a place where we have to rely on the intelligence of the technology to create or respond to the mood we believe we are in. The trouble with this is that mood and the response to mood is highly personal.
What designers need to do is to find ways for technology to help us understand our moods better and to also learn from our behaviors, that way we will get suggestions and experiences that are tailored to the very personal nature of our specific moods.
I've been a bit obsessed lately with distinguishing between 'direct' and 'indirect' information; something like glanceable/passive/serendipitous vs forced/harsh/inconsiderate. The distinction between 'soft' and 'rigid" seems to apply as well.
Apple's latest patent for "schematic maps" could dramatically simplify the interface of its Maps app.The basic idea of "schematic maps" is that maps on smartphones these days are too info-dense. Think about it: When you boot up Maps on your iPhone, you see a whole universe of information that's not directly relevant to the task of getting from point A to point B: streets 10 blocks away that you'll won't cross, names of businesses you didn't ask for, even the ghostly 3-D shapes of buildings.
Compare that to what you'd do if a friend asked you to draw them a map: You'd sketch out a diagram (probably not to scale) of the main street(s) between point A and point B, throw in a few hash marks to represent relevant cross streets, and maybe a box or "X" along the way to indicate landmarks for orientation--and that's it. Much less information, and not accurate to the meter, but much more direct. (These "strip maps" are actually so efficient that the Army teaches tank drivers and soldiers to draw them correctly.)
Occultatio
Occultatio, although sometimes used as a synonym for paralipsis, is more often a literary figure most often seen in plays, where a character describes a scene or object by not describing it. For example, in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, act 4, scene 1, the character Grumio describes the eventful coming of his master and new wife to a young servant by saying,
"Hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how her horse fell and she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard in how miry a place, how she was bemoiled,[...]with many things of worthy memory, which now shall die in oblivion and thou return unexperienced to thy grave."In this speech, Grumio, angry at the servant's interruptions, "refuses" to describe what happened, and in so doing, describes it fully.
H. P. Lovecraft frequently used occultatio to add an element of mystery to his stories, as his unfortunate protagonists met things too horrible or too alien to describe.
In "The Garden of Forking Paths" Jorge Luis Borges suggests that a mystery in a story may be solved if the central narrative is regarded as referring to something by its absence. The Chinese spy Tsun is seen to be referring to time, as the one thing never mentioned in the story.
The notion of paralipsis appears in an essay by Leo Marx in which he explains the rise of the notion of "technology" in the 1800's and early 1900's. In the below Marx refers to an oft-cited speech made by senator Daniel Webster in 1847, expressing a lack of description for a new world being shaped by mechanical progress:
Resorting to a version of paralypsis, the rhetorical device which paradoxically enables us to represent something by declaring our inability to represent it, Webster insisted that no change of comparable magnitude ever had occurred before, neither in antiquity nor in the recent past. The “present era,” he contends, is “altogether new,” all but “miraculous”—so much so, in fact, that it has almost “outstripped human belief.” (Along with human belief, we might add, the new age also seems to have outstripped Webster’s expository resources.) To verify the existence of an emerging semantic void—the gap in the collective vocabulary that later would be filled by the concept of technology—it would be hard to find more persuasive evidence than Webster’s heartfelt paralyptic tribute to human progress.
I cite it here as a form of indirect information; something like the conceptual equivalent of rendering design elements through negative space.
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.])
