Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Last week, the Computer History Museum hosted a panel on “The Anthropology of Innovation”. I had to attend since I’m a fan of anthropology, I’m fascinated by corporate culture and how it leads to goals like innovation, and the panel featured Genevieve Bell of Intel, who Jofish and Janet interned with in Portland one summer. I discovered once I got there that the panel also featured George Kembel, a co-founder of the Stanford d-school, which is an institution I admire. I wasn’t as impressed with the third panelist, Laura Tyson, despite her impressive resume including being Clinton’s Chief Economic Advisor

This post is mostly a transcription of my scribbled notes so I have a searchable way of referring to them in the future. It will be even less coherent than my normal posts, as my notes are mostly quotes I found interesting. C’est la vie.

Gillian Tett, the moderator, is an anthropology major turned journalist. She started off the evening with a few remarks on her observations of innovation in society and in companies:

• Every society has a cognitive map.

• “The blank spaces are important.” I think this referred to the idea that the things we don’t talk about provide clues to the assumptions that are taken for granted and could be fertile areas for questioning.
• Companies are organized by silos – increasingly interconnected but also increasingly fragmented
• Innovation is about silo busting.

George Kembel then spoke from his perspective as a former entrepreneur turned educator.

• He said innovation is “thinking freely in the presence of constraints”. The constraints are important as they bound the problem and create the opportunity for innovation. No constraints means you could do anything.

• To answer the question of “how do you innovate?”, he observed that design thinking is not just about designing products – you can be creative in everything you do, whether it’s designing business models, new processes, etc.
• He thinks of d.school as a “school crossing” where they can integrate different points of views, existing outside of the traditional “schools” of engineering, science, arts, etc.
• He mentioned that when they started, they were looking for faculty support for their interdisciplinary school, and they had expected the young up-and-coming professors to be their advocates. But those younger professors were all trying to establish themselves in their field and earn tenure, so they couldn’t take risks by going outside their field. Surprisingly, it ended up being the long-established tenured professors who were more willing to take the risks of crossing between fields. Interesting observation of incentives and constraints there.
• Pay more attention to people, not technology.
• When you’re not sure of what to do, try lots of experiments.
• On the topic of how the d.school encourages innovation, he said that the focus is on the student as an innovator – it’s getting the person to innovate, not about creating a process of innovation. Teaching students to break barriers, to find new ways of looking at the problem, that’s where the innovation will come from. The teacher does not have all the answers, but is more of a coach and facilitator. I like the human-centered approach, which recognizes that each person is dealing with unique situations, so no standard process will work for all of those situations, but teaching the person techniques will allow them to address their own individual situation.
• One suggestion was for students to get a “shared experience of the user whose life they wanted to make better”, as “the biggest barriers to innovation are our own biases and assumptions.” A great story here – the man leading the GE MRI division was really proud of the great technology he had built that saved lives. After going to the d.school, he realized he had never seen an MRI machine in a hospital, so he visited his local hospital. He saw the machine and it was glorious and a shining beacon of technology. And then he saw the little kid who was the next patient, who shrieked in terror at this ginormous scary instrument and sobbed and wouldn’t let go of her parents. And he realized that technology wasn’t the only factor to consider. After some more work, he developed a program with the hospitals where they turned going to the MRI into a camping adventure, with camp counselors instead of nurses, and with the MRI machine decorated as a tent for them to hide in. This program, while it was better for the kids, also improved his bottom-line instrument throughput, as the kids were eager to get in and didn’t hold up the process. Nifty story to demonstrate how a user-focused approach can lead to breakthroughs in how you perceive a problem.
• To innovate, you must be “willing to invite discomfort into your life” as you realize your biases and assumptions might be wrong. “Don’t just accept the problem as it’s framed.”
• “Our experts are our liabilities”
• On K-12 education, he said the question isn’t how to teach innovation, it’s how to preserve the creativity of kids – they have it, we just have to not crush it out of them.

Genevieve Bell’s comments:

• She started with the great story of how when she was hired at Intel, she asked her manager what she was supposed to study. Her manager said “Women.” Genevieve said “Um, women? You mean, all 3.2 billion of them?” “Yes, we don’t think we understand women.” “Okay….anything else?” “ROW” “What does ROW mean?” “Rest of World.” “So….World in this case means?” “The US” “Oh, okay, so everybody on the planet outside the US, plus women. No problem!”

• One of her rallying cries is “That may be your world view, but it’s not everybody’s”
• She said one of the reasons she was successful was “sheer stubbornness”, and that “people measure me by my being difficult”. One such story was where she told Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, that he was just wrong at a meeting. She could feel everybody around her internally gasping at her audacity, but Otellini asked her why, and she provided him with her data and supporting arguments and changed his mind. Yay anthropology!

I submitted a question that was selected by the panel moderator which was that in an increasingly specialized world where companies are looking for a specific skill set, and with innovation depending on busting silos, where does the generalist fit in? Genevieve had a great response, which was that a “generalist” adds value if they can “curate the conversation from multiple points of view”. She suggested that I was limiting myself by calling myself a generalist, and needed to re-brand and re-imagine my role to create an specialization that companies would value (e.g. “curator”). George said something similar, where he recommended thinking of myself as an integrator, not as a person outside of specialization. Another point he brought up when I approached him after the panel was that the idea of being T-shaped, with both a broad awareness and a deep area of specialization, is somewhat outmoded – we actually need more people who can integrate different viewpoints by having a certain level of depth in multiple fields, rather than just a shallow awareness in several and a deep expertise in one.

The final discussion was interesting, where an audience member asked about how to apply these ideas to health care. Laura suggested taking George’s viewpoint of focusing on the patient, and re-centering everything in the business around the patient. Instead of having specializations where each doctor was only responsible for their area leading to patients getting passed all around the hospital from doctor to doctor, re-design the whole process around making the patient experience better. George expanded upon that by suggesting that we don’t think of patients as sick, but as healthy people who are temporarily un-well, and thinking of medicine as the process to accelerate them back to their normal selves as quickly as possible.

Genevieve then blew my mind by asking if we could take a similar approach to government, where we put the citizen in the middle and organize the government around enabling the citizen. She didn’t exactly know what that would mean, and it depends on the idea that citizens embrace their role as representing their country. People would have to go beyond thinking of themselves as tax-payers who get services from their government (police, army, social security, etc), towards being citizens who embrace their role as representing the government. It was an interesting thought-experiment and a great way to end the night.

Nifty ideas all around. Fun thought-provoking evening, and I’ll have to think more about my generalist branding given the feedback from the panel.

Amazon link

I’m not sure where I heard about this book, but the subtitle, “Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage”, pretty much sold me on at least checking it out, since I’m interested in both design and management. So I got it from the library and read it.

Martin frames business as operating in a “knowledge funnel”, which starts with a mystery, gets refined to a heuristic, and is instituted into an algorithm. He uses McDonald’s as an example of the knowledge funnel.

• A mystery is a new niche or new problem that is not handled by existing solutions. People wander around in the mystery trying things to see if they can figure out something that might work. In the case of McDonald’s, the McDonald brothers were trying to figure out how a restaurant should work in a mobile car culture.

• Once a partial solution has been found, it becomes a heuristic or rule-of-thumb. The heuristic is a frame that provides a useful way of thinking about the mystery that makes its solution tractable. It doesn’t guarantee results, but generates working solutions more often than not. The McDonald’s brothers created the idea of fast food as we know it, with reduced menu options, standardized cooking, and the drive-thru instead of the drive-in. But it was still dependent on the implementation at each new restaurant.
• Once a heuristic has shown the way, the drive for efficiency begins, where the uncertainties of the heuristic are mapped out such that every element can be institutionalized as an algorithm. Once an algorithm exists, it can be standardized such that anybody can run it, or even automated by a computer. Ray Kroc bought the McDonald’s chain and compiled explicit instructions for every aspect of running a franchise, from how long to cook hamburgers, how often to clean the bathrooms, and even how to choose a new location.

The knowledge funnel is a nice little metaphor, but it is not a particularly new way of looking at things. Or maybe that’s just my overactive relational mind making connections everywhere, as I think that the knowledge funnel could be seen as another form of Latour’s Collective process or Moore’s Chasm.

Martin did articulate well how a company is often started around finding a heuristic to solve a mystery, and then spends the rest of its existence refining that heuristic into ever more efficient algorithms. But if the company isn’t careful, another company will find a new mystery that disrupts the original company’s business model (aka the innovator’s dilemma).

One of the reasons that companies get trapped into refining efficiency is that tackling mysteries is scary. Once a company is into the refining heuristic stage, decisions can be made analytically. Refinements can be tested to see if they are more efficient and reliable, so that cold, hard data removes the subjectivity of the heuristic.

Tackling new mysteries requires a leap away from the safety of data and reliability. Martin suggests that “validity” is a better way to think about such problems than reliability – a valid solution that works some of the time is more valuable than a less valid solution that works every time.

The rest of the book describes several case studies of companies that have successfully made the leap to “design thinking”, where attacking the next mystery is valued as much as refining the existing solution. His examples included:

• P&G, which realized that it was better at the heuristic and algorithm phases of the knowledge funnel, so it set the goal of sourcing “half its product innovation from outside the company” to take advantage of its development engine.

• RIM, the makers of Blackberry – I liked the description that the founders “realized RIM’s strengths lay in designing, building and marketing communications devices for busy people” which is a good mission statement since it is completely technology-independent
• Herman Miller, the makers of the Aeron chair – where the CEO emphasized the independence of design to the point where he said “You never ask the sales force what they think of a design. Their job is to sell it.”

One suggestion I liked for companies to avoid ossifying around an existing algorithm was for companies to use a project oriented structure:

“In companies organized around ongoing, permanent tasks, roles are rigidly defined, with clear responsibilities and economic incentives linked tightly to those individual responsibilities. This structure discourages all but senior staff from seeing the big picture… to move along the knowledge funnel is by definition a project; it is a finite effort to move something from mystery to heuristic or from heuristic to algorithm. And such projects demand a business organized accordingly, with ad hoc teams and clearly delimited goals.

In other words, when your entire job is defined around a function, you will not welcome others who are trying to disrupt the status quo, even if that’s the right thing for the company. But if everybody works in a project-oriented mode as they do at design firms like Ideo, they will work towards finishing the current project, and moving onto the next.

Overall, this was a quick read with a few good anecdotes and a useful metaphor, but it’s not a book that I see myself buying for my permanent collection.

P.S. Using the cheat code of doing a book review for a blog post, since they don’t require as much thought. We’ll see how long I can keep this up.

I’ve noticed a fundamental distortion in how I view the world:

• If I know the answer or how to do something, it’s easy.
• If I don’t, it’s hard.

This is a distortion because this worldview devalues my accumulated experience and knowledge. It’s funny because I know how long it took me to learn what I’ve learned, and yet because it seems easy to me now, I assume it’s easy for everybody. A trivial example: I consider myself a low-intermediate ultimate frisbee player, and yet when my coworker asked me a question last week about various terms, I was diagramming plays on the whiteboard, explaining different defensive strategies, etc. – things which took me a couple years of playing regularly to learn.

I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers recently, and one of his points in the book is that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a master of a discipline. I’ve commented before that this is because it takes that sort of repetition to move the skill to the unconscious so that the conscious brain can concentrate on higher level thoughts. In some sense, it’s become “easy” to my conscious brain because the unconscious brain is doing all the heavy lifting.

That’s part of the power of making things easy. Designs which make things easy provide a shortcut to a sort of “mastery”, at least with regard to accomplishing a certain task. The downside is that such shortcuts do not provide the full context necessary for true understanding, and so poor decisions will be made when parameters stray outside the boundaries for which the application was designed.

The mortgage meltdown is a good example of the perils of these shortcuts, as the ability to securitize anything and pass it on was amplified to the point where it brought down the global economy. It shows the importance of being a good information carnivore, somebody who understands their information food chain and the assumptions implicit in that chain. It also suggests that there are times when things should be difficult – because securitization worked so easily and so well, it became the default solution (creating CDOs etc.) without anybody questioning whether it was an appropriate use.

An ideal design would make it easy for users to do what the application was supposed to do, and difficult to do what it’s not. I don’t necessarily think that an application should make it impossible to do “off-label” things, as there are times when people will need to do that, but it should make it very clear that the user is likely to shoot themselves in the foot if they proceed. In other words, “making things easy” isn’t the only goal of design – it’s making the right things easy, and the wrong things hard.

P.S. I await Seppo’s comment explaining how this relates to game design

So I want to build on my last two posts (which both have excellent comments that you should check out, even though I haven’t managed to be coherent enough this week yet to respond). In particular, if I treat everything as a story and I’m asking what the purpose of a design is, the obvious next question is what is the purpose of a story? Or, to put it more broadly, how should one evaluate a story?

I’ve been thinking about this question on and off for weeks, as it keeps on coming up in different contexts. Here are some different possibilities for story metrics:

Ferran Adria (yes, that Ferran Adria) stopped by Google today while in town for his book tour promoting A Day at elBulli. He spent most of the hour talking about innovation and his approach for trying to invent a new culinary language within the universal language of cuisine, with pictures of some amazing nature-inspired desserts, apparently from the other new book, Natura, by Albert Adrià.

But then he asked a question which elicited a laugh from the Googler audience: “Are there any website experts out there?” His question, which he claims he’s been asking for years and not getting an answer, is why website designers don’t put a map as the first thing on their home page. After all, they should cater to the user and make it easy for the user to find what they are looking for. He forced his webpage designer to make a navigation page be the first page at the elBulli site, but wonders why everybody doesn’t do that.

This elicited several answers from the audience. My answer was that the goal of many websites is to get you to stick around on their site – if you can find what you need easily, then you leave their site. I later thought of the analogy to a Las Vegas casino, where the navigation is intentionally designed to make it hard for you to leave the gaming area. Another answer mentioned “That’s why Google exists”, saying that search replaces standard navigation, which makes the good point that a designed information architecture doesn’t necessarily match a user’s worldview and may make it harder rather than easier to find what he or she is looking for (reminding me of Clay Shirky’s point about user-driven classification systems). Another person suggested that most Googlers would probably agree with him, but unfortunately bad designers outnumber good designers.

But I still like my answer, because it gets to the heart of design – what is the purpose which you are trying to achieve with a design? Many websites are designed to have you click around as much as possible, to pile up ad impressions and the chance that you might click on an ad before leaving. Google, on the other hand, has the stated goal “to have users leave its website as quickly as possible”. Is one of these designs better or the “right” way? Adria might think the Google way is clearly the right way, but I believe that design can not be evaluated in an absolute sense – designs must be evaluated within the context of the desired goals.

I’ve often found this attitude helpful when navigating the world. Rather than cursing the stupidity of a design, I wonder why a design might have turned out in that way, and what alternative goals the designer might have been working towards. Making things cheap is a common one. Making companies more money is another. It’s rare that a design can be created in isolation and free of constraints (and some would argue that constraints make for better design), so it helps to understand the constraints, whether philosophical or economical, that guided a design.

I’ve also been finding it helpful to remember this goal-first attitude in my first month at Google. It’s very easy to start going down an infinitely deep hole of documentation or data analysis, and occasionally I have to shake myself and say “Okay, wait, what exactly am I trying to accomplish here, and is what I’m doing moving me towards that goal?” It’s particularly tempting at times to do what is easy rather than what is right (aka “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”).

Getting back to a recurring theme of mine, setting big goals makes it easier to make all other decisions; for instance, Adria is intent on continuing to push the boundaries of innovation in cuisine, so he closes elBulli for six months a year while he and his team experiment with new ideas. Could he make more money by staying open? Of course, but that’s not his goal.

No real deep thoughts on the subject, just that Adria’s confusion as to why people would design something that was clearly inferior in his eyes got me thinking, so I figured I’d use it as an excuse for a blog post.

P.S. Yes, this post was mostly to get to say that it was cool to see Ferran Adria in person. And to get something up – my brain’s been pretty fried from trying to absorb way too much information at work. Hopefully, once I get settled in, I’ll start posting more – as usual, I have several proto-posts in the “couple ideas simmering” stage, but haven’t had the brainpower to expand them into full posts. Maybe I should just start doing scatterbrain posts like my book review roundup posts, where I spent a paragraph on each idea. Hrm.

Amazon link

Do you recognize any of these book covers? Then you know of Chip Kidd’s work.

I first became aware of Chip Kidd when I picked up a book with a striking cover at the library a few years ago. The book was The Cheese Monkeys, and I enjoyed the hilarious over-the-top antics of two art students and a wacky graphic design prof. The jacket copy informed me that Kidd was a leading book cover designer, and so I started keeping an eye out for his work.

Earlier this summer, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where they were having a “Design Triennial” to celebrate great design from the past three years. One of the displays was Chip Kidd’s book covers – he had published a retrospective of his work over the past twenty years. I flipped through the book and really liked it. I finally bought it last month when I had an Amazon gift certificate to use.

It’s great. 400 pages of beautiful images of book covers, with a paragraph of commentary from Kidd on each page explaining what he was trying to do. You can see the care and detail which Kidd puts into each and every one of the covers that he designs. I really liked that he includes preliminary sketches, first drafts, and failed attempts of certain covers. By seeing what didn’t work, the reader gets a much better sense of why the final cover does work. It was also great to see his designs for a collection of an author’s work in one place, so that the common design elements popped out.

He also includes great quotes from the authors that he has worked with expressing awe and admiration that Kidd can capture the souls of their books in a few well-designed graphic elements. One memorable account is from a first-time novelist who hated the cover designs that her publisher sent her. Her publisher said “Go to the book store, find a few covers that you like, get the designers’ names, and we’ll go hire one of them to design your cover.” She went to the store, picked four completely different covers so she could get a range of designers, and then found out that all four were designed by Kidd.

While I don’t have an instinct for graphic design myself, I really enjoyed reading about the process that Kidd uses to get his ideas. Sometimes it’s serendipity – while reading the book, he’ll come across an object at a rummage sale that suits the book’s content perfectly. Sometimes it’s hard work – several attempts before converging on one that everybody likes. He will do whatever suits the book’s content best – look at some of the different approaches he uses:

As my experience of finding The Cheese Monkeys demonstrated, a book often is judged by its cover, and can influence somebody to pick up a book they might not otherwise have. If you love books and are interested in graphic design, I’d recommend this book. Come flip through my copy if you’re curious.

Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so easy to adopt.

I started using LiveJournal because I wanted to read the posts that my friends had “locked” so that only their LiveJournal friends could read them. I figured I would create a free account, get accepted as a friend to those people, and that would be it. But as I started using it, I discovered more and more ways in which to use it.

LiveJournal made it easy for me to keep track of all the people whose LiveJournal posts I wanted to read. Instead of having to go to each individual person’s page, as I had been doing, I could just go to my Friends page, and get a list of what my friends have been up to organized neatly into reverse chronological order. To expand my network was also trivial. When I clicked on a person’s name, it took me to their LiveJournal profile which listed all of their friends, making it easy for me to find other people I knew.

LiveJournal gets several other details right in helping me figure out what to do. For instance, if you look at the Friends page, on the left side, it shows me my main options: Recent Entries, Archive, Friends, User Info, My Website. There are other options in various menus, but the primary ones make it clear that LiveJournal is for writing my own posts, and for reading my friends’ posts. Also, LiveJournal allows me to jump into a comment thread wherever I feel comfortable, which reduces the anxiety of public “speaking”.

Making things easy is vital in getting me to do something. Blogging software is a great example. When I first started my web page back in 1994, I had a section devoted to ramblings. I only posted every few months, though, because the cognitive overhead of having to create a new HTML file every time I wanted to say something was too much. It’s not hard to create a file, but it meant that I was doing something other than trying to write my thoughts. Once I switched to blosxom, it was slightly easier because I just had to create a text file, but when I switched to WordPress and could start blogging with one click, things got much easier.

Good software should make it obvious what I should do first, and make it straightforward for me to accomplish something useful. LiveJournal has all sorts of things that I don’t use, like communities and tiered permissions, but that’s okay because I still get value out of it from the things I started using from the beginning. WordPress is unbelievably customizable, but I was able to start putting up posts quickly, and only look into customization when I want to try something new.

I mentioned in my last post that I couldn’t figure out what to do on Facebook. Now that Jofish friended me and has given me some tips, I can see there was a bootstrapping issue, as none of the people I had friended were using Facebook extensively, so I had no examples of how one might use it. Facebook also suffered because I did not (and still don’t) have a compelling reason to use it, as contrasted with other new technologies:

• With LiveJournal, I wanted to read my friends’ locked posts.
• With WordPress, I wanted a better blogging system with comments and trackbacks.
• With RSS, I wanted to keep up with dozens of irregularly updated blogs.

I’m still not quite sure what the compelling reason might be for using Facebook, although Jofish’s comment that it’s “a tool to communicate with/between late teens/early twenty somethings in or recently graduated from college” is probably closest.

Twitter is another technology I’m not sure I see the case for yet. Twitter’s big moment this year was at SXSW, where it seemed like everybody started using it. The conference setting was a perfect scenario for Twitter, as everybody wanted to know where everybody else was, so the quick updates to an always accessible communications channel enabled swarming behavior. And it seemed like there was a tipping point as enough people used it that everybody started using it because everybody else was using it. I’m still skeptical of its use in normal life, but examples like Charlie using Twitter to meet up for dinner may convince me eventually.

So what characteristics does social software need to make it easy to adopt?

• There needs to be a compelling reason to use it. I listed a few above, but there has to be a goal that convinces me it’s worth investing the time to figure out how to use it.
• The easier it is to accomplish the goal, the better. If the learning investment is lower, the reason doesn’t have to be as compelling.
• Make my friends’ actions visible and copyable. In new environments, we learn by imitating others. If I can’t see what others are doing, I’ll probably do nothing.
• Make it useful even if not all of my friends use it. If the first step in making it useful is getting all of my friends on board, I’m never going to invest the effort. I think Dodgeball suffers from this problem.
• I’m sure there are others – what are your suggestions?

P.S. Unsurprisingly, these points reflect the design principles I espoused in my Ambidextrous article.

I went to my second likemind this morning, and once again really enjoyed the coffee and conversation.

One person at the table where I sat posed the question of how an artist can be unique or “deviant” in today’s society. There used to be a well-defined mainstream that you could rebel against and do your own thing, with recent examples being rap, punk music, and hiphop. But the mainstream has caught up and reintegrated all of those things. In some sense, there is no way to leave the mainstream because even if you rebel, somebody’s already done that, so you’re just joining a different community. We’ve experienced waves of rebellion, with the hippies rebelling against the Eisenhower 50s, and the greed is good yuppies rebelling against the hippies in the 80s, and the bobos rebelling against both in the 90s, etc. It seems like it’s all been tried, which is the frustration that this artist was expressing.

I was a bit skeptical, as it seems like anybody declares there’s nothing new to do, truly innovative things start happening very soon afterwards, such as the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity soon after classical physics thought they had things wrapped up with Newton and Maxwell. But it was an interesting question.

My take on it was that “rebelling” these days often means just leaving one community and joining another, with the “we will all be nonconformist together” sentiment. I think the really innovative stuff is going to come out of integration of communities, to stay in the first community and bring elements of other communities into it. I’d been meaning to blog about a recent post by Grant McCracken where he emphasizes the importance to innovation of incorporating multiple perspectives, and it ties in nicely with this theme. This is also reminiscent of the idea of “productive friction” from The Only Sustainable Edge. It’s at the interface between communities that truly new ideas will be sprouting.

Part of this is a consequence of how much effort it takes to be at the center of a community. Another person at the table used the world of fashion to illustrate that point – the high-end designers at the center of the world are consumed with staying at the bleeding edge of fashion, and must continue to move quickly to stay ahead of the mainstream. Their ideas move out in concentric circles, to the fashion-aware people, then the people who read fashion magazines, and outward still to Target and WalMart shoppers, who don’t have to pay attention as the innovations from the bleeding edge have long since been absorbed into the majority. But because everything in this world moves faster now, the adoption into the majority happens on the order of months or weeks instead of years, so the fashion insiders are in the Red Queen’s Race, running ever faster to stay in the same place.

In technology, the same phenomenon is called Crossing the Chasm. Music has its own structure, with the hipster insiders flocking to Pitchfork to keep up with what’s current. Design, architecture, art… all of these communities have similar adoption patterns. You can be a total insider in one community and be a total outsider in another. In fact, you almost have to be because being an insider requires such a deep level of commitment.

So I have this lovely image of rings of innovative ideas radiating outwards from these different communities throughout the world, and the rings creating these amazing interference patterns like waves, sometimes interfering constructively and sometimes destructively, with different people in different places on the map depending on their level of commitment to the various communities. And the really nifty new ideas will be where somebody is located at an interesting location where constructive interference is happening. I think there’s a real incentive to establish links to as many insiders as possible, to hear what’s happening first and see if you can figure out how to tie it all together.

Is there nothing new under the sun? Perhaps. But there are always new combinations to try. And I think that finding those combinations will be the challenge moving forward, as more people are caught up in the Red Queen’s Race in this world of increasing specialization. I’m still trying to figure out how to rebel from that scenario, as discussed here and here. We’ll see what happens.

P.S. To give attribution where it’s due, the actual image to the right above is taken from Matthew Klein.

P.P.S. Another likemind attendee handed out postcards with illustrations of the SoraPot, a teapot he had designed. Very slick. I just wanted to include a link to it because I liked it.

I was thinking a little bit more about the point I mentioned in my previous post where the iPod Shuffle is actually easier to use because it doesn’t give you a choice about what music to listen to next. With my other MP3 player, I’ll often spend a few minutes trying to decide what kind of music I’m in the mood for, and whether I’d have time to listen to the whole album, and things like that. With the Shuffle, all of that is taken away from me, and I’m left with only a couple decisions – “This song or the next one” and “Louder or softer”.

Alan Cooper tells a similar story in his book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, in a case study about redesigning scanner software for Logitech. His team realized that most people are trying to do only three tasks with an image after scanning: cropping, resizing and reorienting. So they took out all of the other “functionality” and concentrated on making those three tasks as simple as possible. In user testing, their software was consistently rated as the most powerful despite objectively having the least number of features.

I think another aspect of choice is that increasing the number of choices makes it harder to get started. Figuring out the first thing to do often paralyzes us into doing nothing at all. Sometimes I won’t put on music because I can’t decide what I want to listen to. I think the same is true in most endeavors. Presenting more options does not help – it actually makes it harder. If anything, it would be better to be restricted to one choice, one simple thing, as a way to get started, like the iPod Shuffle. Once I become more comfortable with the scenario, then I can handle more choices; in fact, my brain will have been trained to make those choices subconsciously.

But when I’m faced with a new scenario, I don’t have those cognitive subroutines built yet. I’m faced with an infinite number of choices, and have no way of selecting between them, because I don’t have the experience. How does one deal with this situation?

I think the answer is to pick something, anything, and just get started. You won’t know until later whether it was the right choice, but since you have no basis for making a choice, all choices are valid, so long as you continue to evaluate and evolve based on the results.

The idea of just picking something reminds me of a story Robert Pirsig tells in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where Phaedrus gives his class a writing assignment, and one girl just can’t figure out what to write about. So he narrows it down, and says write about the town. She’s still stuck. Write about the city hall. Still stuck. Finally he says, write your essay about the top left brick of the front of city hall. And she looked at him as if he was crazy. But once she started writing about that brick, the dam broke, and she wrote a beautiful paper. The top left brick was completely arbitrary, but by continuing to remove choices, she was eventually able to get past her paralysis and get started.

Our society often favors increased number of choices. A decision that gives us more choices must be the right decision. After all, who wouldn’t want more opportunities, more options, more features? But I’m starting to wonder if that’s the case. Research like that described by the Paradox of Choice indicates that choice is good up to a certain point, and then becomes overwhelming. The examples I gave above certainly seem to indicate that choices can often get in the way of getting things done.

There’s a tension in design here. On the one hand, having more features and more customizability lets us make things work exactly the way we want. But if a design presents too many features and too much customizability, it becomes intimidating and hard to get started. I think there’s value in presenting a well-marked path forward for the novice user, so that they don’t have to make decisions they are not competent to make yet. Then present them with more options when they have enough experience that they can make those decisions. Actually, this approach reminds me a lot of my Ambidextrous article.

It’s very difficult for software to get this right. Most software tends towards the too many features right away approach. And while I’m a fan of the 37Signals Getting Real approach, I wonder if it swings too far in the other direction. The topic of simplicity in design has been on many bloggers’ minds recently. And I’m not sure there’s a right answer. For each case, there will need to be a balance struck on the appropriate number of choices presented to the user at any point in time.

And, as usual, I end on a completely ambiguous point. No punditry here with a strong opinion and withering scorn for anybody that disagrees. It’s all about the conversation for me, the acknowledgment of different viewpoints, and the benefits and drawbacks of those viewpoints.

P.S. My laptop is on its way back to HP to get its backlight fixed, so I am going to be living computer-free for a week or so. No blogging unless I stay late at work as I am tonight.