Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
“Since the time when man began to control the environment he has been plagued by his limited ability to speculate..."
The first 2:30 of this video might be my favorite description of human limitation, design, and innovation through exposure for quite awhile.
But why paper? Isn't that so 20th century? ...My first knee-jerk reaction to Little Printer was bemused bewilderment--really? this?--but it's hard to deny Webb's point. He cited Bret Victor's recent rant against the "pictures under glass" interaction paradigm, in which all our media is sequestered beyond our reach, divorced from the physical world that we actually live in. Little Printer may seem like a throwback at first, but it's actually a disruptive, weird, but undeniably innovative way to liberate digital content from its screen-based prison. It's about making "the cloud" tangible and intimate again, by bringing it into the home in a physical way.
The above from a reaction to BERG's new product "Little Printer." A fascinating object in itself, but the excerpts above reminds me of something more important: The surprising part about the future isn't that it turns out to be an exciting, unknown world. It is surprising precisely because it's so much like the present while we think it's supposed to be an exciting, unknown world.
This is a natural consequence of the difference between the past and the future. I can explain.
We can be surprised by the past, because the past we can look back far enough and see that it was a completely different place. The surprise we're looking for is in contrast, and that contrast really exists in the past. We're not surprised when we're shocked by the past.
We can in fact imagine far into the future. But in the sense that the contrast of the past "really" exists the further you go back, the future only "really" exists one day at a time. So we are surprised when we aren't shocked by the future, because a day from now looks a lot like today.
(This may seem trivial, but I find this of importance and of interest because this is a human limitation, not a limitation of the future. The lack of contrast only matters to humans, who are remarkably susceptible to change blindness of the "slow change" sort. You may continue to think it's trivial, but my experience in studying both humans and the future has lead me to feel that understanding human limitation is much more important than understanding the future. The short version of my argument might be something like: "If you can design for humans, then you can design the [unsurprising] future.")
The visible growth of ordered structures in the universe seemed paradoxical to nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, who believed in a dismal doctrine called the heat death. Lord Kelvin, one of the leading physicists of that time, promoted the heat death dogma, predicting that the flow of heat from warmer to cooler objects will result in a decrease of temperature differences everywhere, until all temperatures ultimately become equal. Life needs temperature differences, to avoid being stifled by its waste heat. So life will disappear.
This dismal view of the future was in startling contrast to the ebullient growth of life that we see around us. Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox. The best popular account of the disappearance of the paradox is a chapter, “How Order Was Born of Chaos,” in the book Creation of the Universe, by Fang Lizhi and his wife Li Shuxian.2 Fang Lizhi is doubly famous as a leading Chinese astronomer and a leading political dissident. He is now pursuing his double career at the University of Arizona.
The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.
We now know that the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.
Filed this under my list of reasons I'm fascinated by "seeming paradoxes": things that seem like one thing but are really another once we have more information.
These things are generally errors in human intuition; it's critically important to note "nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire," because most of our understanding of the world is in some way critically flawed by our incredibly limited ability to observe things. (I probably don't need to say that for as much as we rely on it, natural human visual observation is absurdly flawed/limited)
So I use "error" loosely, given that this kind of intuition is limited by the state of human understanding, and by definition we'll never have *all* the information there is to be had about the universe. It's more of a beautiful kind of error that allows for the continual search for knowledge and understanding.
EDIT: I just realized the above article goes on to say the following:
The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information.
Which wonderfully captures what I meant above by "beautiful." It also expresses an idea/charge I'm starting to think of as the goal to "design for friction." The notion is that comfortable, frictionless experiences/lives are themselves seeming paradoxes, seemingly admirable goals but in fact detrimental from a long-term perspective.
Advertising is a silly business that I find amusing, but I'll draw from it to make a quick observation. If you're familiar enough with the advertising world, you know that there are people called copywriters who write out the lines you read in the above. They don't just make up these thoughts, there's someone called an account planner who's role it is to completely understand the target audience (guys who'd buy Johnny Walker, in this case), and distill all of that understanding into a concise, one-page Creative Brief. The idea being that the creative brief is the guiding inspiration that the creative team can then walk away with and focus their superpowers on.
I tend to point to limitation as a type of value (see: Non-linear books, and a note on art through limitation); this is something like a manifestation of that idea. Think: if you tell people they can do anything, they more often than not don't know what to do. This is why games are fun, precisely because you *can't* do anything. No one ever inspires others by saying "you can do anything!" You inspire people by saying "you can only do a limited set of things."
The internet was invented as the ultimate standard, it is literally made of rules. Online content abides by some intentional and unintentional rules, and texture, smell, weight, flavour and time are flattened together for the screen. Computers appear to instantaneously transform objects into images and meaning into information.
404 Error: The Object Is Not Online brings together questionably digitized materials with undoubtedly material digital systems to explore the translation of objects into online representations. It uses objects from the CCA Collection to examine the shift, and to explore some differences between seemingly limitless cyberspace and the museum where presence and real space are the rule.
Rules = meaning.
Also of note from the exhibition's page:
"One can make out of failure a powerful strategy for working, like the bad magician transcending illusion."
– Vik Muniz
Lately I've been fond of saying things like "reality is just reality and it doesn't really care what you think of it," expressed in a couple different ways here.
The above is a classic take on the idea, though focused on our consistent tendency to filter things we're exposed to. I like to also include the things that we're limited from being exposed to. A nice example might be the idea that we didn't know what germs were until we had technology sufficient enough to capture them in a way that accommodated our natural visual limitations. So I'd probably add to "ignored" something like "intangible" or "out-of-reach," or "unintuitive," etc.
Ray Kurzweil too, expounds on this idea of the power of patterns:
“I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It's something that transcends the semblance of parts you've put together. That is the nature of technology, and it's the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the rightcombination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern.”
My general thesis is that value comes from arranging things in a way that complement and fit within our biological limitations. These limitations constrain us to recognize patterns in only very specific ways, and in that very constraint lies value.
(This is an abstract statement, so one purpose of this blog is to organize information in a way that this illuminates this thesis, solidifying and fading it into view slowly over time. A wonderfully emergent expression of itself, perhaps.)
The above is from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas; I'm presently studying causality. I sometimes think it's the only thing worth studying*.
Especially considering the nice little bit inside this article on Malebranch's thinking in The Search For Truth, where he defines a real cause as "something between which and it's effects, the mind perceives a necessary connection."
'Perceives' is the critical word here. The foundation of a thesis that is slowly brewing in my mind is that the human brain is distinctly, consistently, and measurably limited in a number of interesting and important ways - this has profound implications on the things we perceive, and therefore the things we believe (subtext: we should have little expectation that the things we believe correspond with reality).
Another way of thinking about this is that if we're limited in the way we perceive things, then the connections we make between causes and effects aren't necessarily the reality of what causes an effect. The connections we make just happen to be the ones that are most intuitive to us.
What follows from this is that if our conception of cause and effect is suspect, then we should be careful about the way we think of something a little more tangible: decision-making.
That is to say, if we are aware of our limitations in understanding the impact of our decisions, perhaps we can be a little more careful about judging what "right" and "wrong" decisions look like.
One idea I really like around this topic is Frank Gavin's notion of Chronological Proportionality, which I take as a framework for illustrating how the decisions and events we think are important almost never are.
*I don't think this all the time, obviously. Studying general concepts gives you a high-level scope, like looking down on the world from the furthest zoom on a digital map; useful for understanding the world, not so useful for understanding how to get from your house to the mall. When I say "making things a little more tangible" in the above, I'm essentially saying something like "zooming in a little bit."
Books in traditional form are necessarily linear. So it's notable that savvy content creators are experimenting with different methods of delivery now available - writers like Stephen Fry are able to create books like "The Fry Chronicles" pictured above that deliver a story less rigidly confined. This autobiography is a book released as a mobile app, with sections represented as spines along a circular interface rather than in page-by-page form. Readers can scroll through the book by referencing the color-coded category markers, distinguishing between sections containing "People, Subjects, Feelings and Fryisms."
The interface indeed shows how linear books can be deconstructed into a form where the reader chooses how the story unfolds. It's very much in the spirit of that grail of the digital age - the personalized experience.
As more creators explore these unstructured models of delivery, I'm guessing we'll see a key question emerge: to what extent is this reader-created experience valuable in contrast to the opposing idea of the thoughtfully curated story, a structured narrative that only an artist can craft?
That is to say: I may be able to bang about the keyboard and make my own "personalized" song, but I'm a far cry from Chopin.
I expect that what we will see is thoughtful designers having to consider how to give meaningful structure to non-linear interfaces. One way to think about this is to consider than an autobiography without any structure is akin to reading someone's Twitter timeline in no particular order - sure to be interesting on some level, but likely quite lacking in terms of creating an engaging experience.
Hence the role of the designer here (as in most cases) is to create value through limiting the degree of freedom the end-user has.
I think I'd just supplement the "alogical, but hopefully meaningful" bit with the notion that meaning comes from the limitation of alogical connections towards the logical.
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.])
