Innovation and Wonder

National Human Genome Research Institute

I think that most generations of human beings around the world have probably said, “How incredibly lucky we are to be living in the most exciting time in all of human history.” We should be no different. I see so many people taking for granted the explosion in human knowledge, understanding, and technology. Here’s a list of things, off the top of my head, which I find awe-inspiring:

• the mapping of the human genome
• global telecommunications
• social networking and technologies of emergence
• advances in space exploration
• medical science technology
• revolutionized cancer treatment
• AIDS as a chronic, manageable issue rather than a death sentence
• stem cell research and re-growth of organs
• harnessing sustainable energies
• the global discussion on and appreciation for universal economic development

Education and Urgency

For awhile now, I've had this nagging sense of urgency. Perhaps it is the product of growing up in a culture with a rather consistent narrative about success, one that lauds the achievements of self-made, twenty-something millionaires as if they were the new lords of the universe. Or perhaps I'm just hanging out with too many people in grad school while I'm still figuring things out. Either way, I ran across the site of designer Alessandro Segalini and found these inspiring words. I can't find them anywhere else, so Alessandro either wrote it or paraphrased it.

I asked the Professor about the secret of success; two words.
The Professor said: “Right decisions.”
Then I asked how I can make the right decision; one word.
The Professor said: “Experience.”
I asked what is the secret of experience.
The Professor said: “Wrong decisions.”

John Dewey - Portrait by Anthony Hare

And in the same place, I found this John Dewey quote. I did a report on John Dewey when I was in grade school and it made a big impression on me, even as a very young person. Finding this quote has inspired me to look further into the life and philosophy of this great educator.

I believe that education is a process of living, and not a preparation for future living.

Practical Wisdom and Incentives

Barry Schwartz, in a TED talk, speaks about the value of practical wisdom and the problems with reliance on rules and incentives. Near the end of his talk, he quickly lauds Aaron Feuerstein as a moral hero for having gone against the pressures of Wall Street after a fire destroyed Malden Mills. He chose to keep everyone on the payroll at immense cost to the company and to shareholder value because doing otherwise would irreparably damage the Massachusetts community where they were located, according to Shwartz.

Robert Reich also mentions the actions of Feuerstein in his book, Supercapitalism. Malden Mills had to file Chapter 11 in 2001 as a direct result of the $15 million it took to keep everyone paid and the insistence on staying in Lawrence, Mass. where wages remained high in spite of more “competitive” wages elsewhere (North Carolina or subcontracting in China). Feuerstein was fired and replaced with someone who took most of the jobs out of the community.

Barry Schwartz’s talk was in 2009, eight years after the bankruptcy, “Three thousand employees, he kept every one of them on the payroll. Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it’s worth more. We’re doing fine.”

Obviously not. Feuerstein, according to Reich, is an anachronism, a “corporate statesmen” in an era of ruthless competition.

I find myself to be “of two minds”, as Reich puts eloquently. I want to live in a world where people and organizations can make decisions that are morally and socially beneficial to others, but I also see that as an impossibility given the current economic context. Shareholder value will continue to trump any sort of ethical stance until we find a way to reassert ourselves as citizens with moral agency.

Design as Storytelling

Being in the process of my first real estate purchase, this article about the redesign of the mortgage disclosure form (MDF) caught my eye:
www.fastcodesign.com/1663487/home-buying-makeover

This sort of project is precisely what excites me about design. Buying a home, especially in America, comes with a powerful narrative fraught with emotion and passion. The confusion of documents composed of vast seas of black and white legalese is unsettling at best, perhaps even counterproductive. In comes a group of people who understand the importance of the experience and are able to synthesize the perspectives of lenders and regulators as well as (and more importantly) the borrower. An accessible and communicative MDF will not prevent a future mortgage crisis all by itself, but it provides an empowering mental model for the layperson. This model can serve as scaffolding upon which the details of the transaction are hung. Lacking a working mental model, we have no insertion point for new vocabulary, no way to create patterns and relationships. Foundational understanding allows us to be involved in the telling of the story of how a situation fits into our lives. Design, therefore, is not the story but the stage.

Another fine example:
http://www.jonkolko.com/educationCourse370Taxes.php

Pattern and Surprise

I love the process of slowly recognizing a pattern in your own cognition and then later discovering an explanation of it that is supported by scientific research. This happened to me the other day when I read that human beings prefer to look at fractal patterns over non-fractal patterns, and we like our fractals with a density of 1.3, which oxymoronically exhibits “low complexity.” Complexity, but not too much. Michael Gazzaniga writes about this in Human: the Science Behind what Makes Us Unique.

Similarly, David Brooks talks about how we prefer music that conforms to traditional patterns of composition while still offering moments of surprise. For a long time, I have noticed that I’ll quickly dislike a piece of music if it is too predictable, even if I know that I enjoy similar works. The parts of music that I love the most are those little divergences in the melody, the playful spots in the rhythm, the interesting pairings of harmony. I have unconsciously smiled countless times when something catches my ear that my head wasn’t expecting.

This is probably part of the reason that culture is so slow to change. There is a great example of the way our brains accept or reject things that don’t conform to our previous experiences. I heard it on an episode of RadioLab. Parisian ballet goers responded to Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by rioting against it. It was so new and groundbreaking that it is speculated they went momentarily insane. If I remember correctly (I’ll have to go back and listen again), he was received the very next year in the same city with resounding acclaim. And we know the piece best from Disney’s Fantasia.  It’s not so controversial anymore, I suppose, but our brains are certainly picky the first time we encounter something.

Reach and Reciprocity

I feel as if I’ve only just learned how to learn.

I’m currently reading David Brooks’ The Social Animal. In it, Brooks references the idea of Reach and Reciprocity found in Richard Ogle’s Smart World.

“Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless.”

For a long time I have intuited the concept of Reach and Reciprocity without it becoming conscious. When I read a book and it seems to have “come into my life at just the right time,” or some such sentimentality, I realize that I had simply reached out to some knowledge that could be effectively integrated with my past experience at that time. In delving into a new topic of interest, I spend a lot of time finding just the right book that will match my current intellectual standing and motivations, that will most efficiently convey a wide, solid foundational understanding.

When I learned to play the banjo, I knew, from having experienced skill level plateaus with the guitar, that it would be essential to start with the fundamentals (I still can’t use my pinky very well to play guitar). I spent two weeks just using my right hand, learning the strumming technique before playing a single chord, let alone a song. With my muscle memory in place, I could let that focus drop away and begin to think about how to position my left hand as the right kept strumming away, bum-ditty bum-ditty bum-ditty.

I wonder how much earlier I would have been capable of this limited self-knowledge. How much earlier I could have learned how to learn, been able to acknowledge and examine, in some small way, the tumultuous processes of synthesis going on in my skull. Can this knowledge of ideas and how the brain develops and organizes information be successfully implemented and passed on in the classroom? Perhaps therein lies the rub. Young minds may simply not be at the point in their development where they can effectively venture out to gather up the concept of reach and reciprocity. To learn how to learn, we must simply do it, and suffer the results of inevitable failed attempts. But the greatest teachers carry this knowledge and serve as excellent guides along the way.

Ethics and Economics

I have noticed in myself a rather strong emotional reaction to the economic crisis, especially as concerns the financial sector. I think I’ve narrowed it down to a disappointment and anxiety over what I see as a lack of ethical principles being applied to the credit system. I don’t like to think that we live in a world where there are a minority of individuals in a supposedly democratic society outside the rule of law as established according to our collective values. It doesn’t even bother me specifically that some individuals within the financial system would choose to flout generally accepted standards of ethics. All types of people make these breaches of ethics all the time if the price is right. What has been so unsettling is to learn that the system put in place to monitor such action and to bring violators to justice has been systematically dismantled over decades.

It is overwhelming to think of how to go about reestablishing the prudent rule of law when a self-interested and seemingly impune minority has so much power and wealth.

However, I am reading Robert Reich’s Aftershock right now and have just finished reading this…

In order to fix what needs fixing, we need to be clear about what broke. The underlying problem is not that financial institutions were reckless, although they were. The ultimate solution, therefore, isn’t just to make them more prudent. Nor is the central problem that consumers borrowed too much, although they did. The solution, therefore, isn’t merely to get Americans to save more and consume less.

To summarize: The fundamental problem is that Americans no longer have the purchasing power to buy what the U.S. economy is capable of producing. The reason is that a larger and larger portion of total income has been going to the top. What’s broken is the basic bargain linking pay to production. The solution is to remake the bargain…

A fundamentally new economy is required — the next stage of capitalism. But how will we get there? And what will it look like when we do?

There are essentially two paths from here. Only one will get us to where we want to be.

To be continued.

On modernism

Until recently, I feel like I’ve really struggled to understand the work of people like Jackson Pollock, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Grant Achatz. In the last couple of months, I have run across two bits of wisdom that have changed the way I view cultural modernism.

The first is a quote from Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead that I read embedded within Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design. Kolko was writing about the integrity of materials in design when he said…

One can’t help but think of the idealistic Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, as he denounces the Parthenon as poorly architected: ‘The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they made for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble… Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood…’

Reading this was a definite aha moment for me. Modern architecture, and modernism in general, has been an attempt to break the chain, to create solutions from scratch based on available technology and needs of the day. Modern art, from this perspective, can be seen as a deconstruction and calling out of those chains of unquestioned cultural productions.

Pheasant with shallot, cider gelée, and burning oak leaves

The second bit of wisdom came from Grant Achatz, who was being interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air this morning. I was surprised at first to hear Achatz say that he and the others at his restaurant sometimes intentionally create culinary experiences that intimidate. This, Achatz says, is a way to break the monotony of something that we do every day, often without reflection: eating. It is easy to overlook the details in a dish with fork in hand, ready to shovel up the plate’s contents before the waiter can remove his hand from the table. However, if the dish comes out suspended in a wire armature with smoldering oak leaves, you are taken aback, intrigued, intimidated, maybe even turned on.

The power of modernism is in the lack of fear for novelty, the embrace of possibility. Achatz says that they are able to create new and interesting culinary experiences because they never say no to an idea. This is not to say that they put everything they make in front of guests, but that they at least respect the potentiality of ideas and are willing to experiment, to dabble in the unknown.

I also love that Achatz aspires to incorporate all of the senses into his food. He is especially cognizant of aroma, hence the smoldering oak leaves.

Vik Muniz - Sugar Children

Vik Muniz, in the documentary Wasteland, is another artist that is consciously aware of the materials he uses in his art. He is able to create representations out of materials that his subjects have a direct connection with, making the art all the more powerful.

Efficiency and innovation

Classically, in the industrial economy, there have been two choices on the path toward profits, growth, and stability: efficiency and innovation. This is a false choice.

Management has long seen efficiency maximization as the mutually exclusive and economical option. The other option, creating a more valued product that can be sold at a higher margin, is fraught with the cost and risk that is the stuff of executive ulcers the world over. A thorough evaluation of the value and supply chains in an organization is a way of doing more with less, running lean and mean.

Now, while the pursuit of efficiency may seem like the ultimate exercise in augmenting shareholder value, implementation is a minefield of conflicting organizational management philosophies.

Indulge me in some logic for a moment:

According to Roger Martin, long-term success comes from a balance of the efficient exploitation of existing products and services and the pursuit of innovation. Since business owners would all say that they strive for long-term success (despite their behavior), we can conclude that all businesses should strive to balance efficient operations with innovation.

A caller to Tom Ashbrook’s On Point this morning said that, in his experience, owners are not interested in employees that care about products. Rather, they are interested in the number of widgets that can be produced per hour. It is obvious, from Martin’s assertion above, that any business predicated on this model will eventually fail, most likely from being overtaken by an unforeseen competitor’s much better, novel solution. That said, our conclusion is that innovation is a fundamental element of long-term success.

If innovation is a fundamental element of long-term success, then how can it be that success-driver owners would do everything in their power to thwart the efforts of innovative employees in their ranks? Conclusion: Short-sighted and plain old bad business. All across the nation, and I’d venture to guess the world, there are people toiling away in anonymity, the pride in their work waning. These are people who have ever so much to contribute to the organizational conversation, people whose human capital stagnates in so many cubicles.

If management were to incorporate the need for innovation into the analysis of organizational effeciency then this underutilization of human capital would be readily apparent.

How tragic that the great potential of individuals and organizations is squandered simply because of this false dichotomy between efficiency and innovation.

The above approach is rather cold and calculative in an attempt to ground the argument in the world of traditional business management. I also wonder if we haven’t somehow trained businesspeople out of their own value systems. That is to say that I wonder if business education and pressures on the job haven’t created a negative feedback loop in which people straddle an ever widening gap between their personal value system and that of the business. Many people are talking about the shift toward more holistic perspectives in business that take account of things like environmental impact, employee happiness, and the creation of real value. There are even success stories that show this paradigm shift to be profitable, but it is disheartening to see so little of it. What I see is a polarization where the progressive thought leaders go off towards holistic success while the greedy fatcats continue to reap ever larger rewards while creating ever larger externalities making it ever more difficult for us to maintain our integrity.

Agility and design

In Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation, there is a story about TellMe, the company behind much of the voice-recognition software we know best as telephone support.

One of the company execs was having dinner with a client from UPS. Long story short, the client piped up over appetizers about the official name change from United Parcel Service to the more succinct UPS, going the way of so many longstanding corporate brands these days. The TellMe greeting, when calling the UPS hotline, still referred to United Parcel Service. The client acknowledged that it was a small detail but that it was important to them. Mr. TellMe rose at a pause in the conversation to make a telephone call. When dessert rolled around, the client was handed a cell phone and was asked, “Try it again. I think you’ll like what you hear.”

This story illustrates the agility companies are capable of when they have a culture of experimentation, a bold willingness to allow faults in their products and services in order to seek greater refinement.

How to build agility into the design of a service seems like a great challenge. We are used to thinking of projects being somehow "finished" when they have already gone through an iterative design process and emerged all smooth and shiny. But this is very much a product-based way of thinking. Manufactured goods offer a certain flexibility for the creative types willing to see beyond their intended uses and relate to them in novel ways, but services can be communicative in a way that stuff really can't. Interaction and service design are exciting because there is the possibility for constant evolution. If you want the chair to evolve, you have to make a new one or hack at the old one (which doesn't lead to a very elegant chair).

Fixed Opportunities Part 2: My list

I looked around the office and discovered all these "fixed opportunities" in just a few minutes:

• Stack of Post-its covering an annoying green light below my monitor.

• Door trim notched out to accomodate the wall-mounted door stop.

• Guy's monitor behind me has three Post-its stuck to it each with a unique limitation of the internal software scrawled on it.

• My own desk is covered with notes documenting info that software forces me to remember rather than simply taking care of it for me.

• Another coworker has numerous Post-its all over her desk reminding her of various systems failures. My personal favorite is pictured here.

• Hood vent in the break room with tape over one switch and a tiny sign below it that reads "If you burn popcorn, please turn on the exhaust fan, which is switched to the left of the coffeepots."

• Coffeepot with blue tape on the handle for "decaf"

• Paper towels under the automatic soap dispenser in the bathroom to catch errant soap (be careful taking pictures in the bathroom)

• Printer with those label maker notes all over it explaining operation and cleaning

• And on my way home, I noticed the dashboard where I had shoved a folded up piece of paper in the corner to dampen an annoying clicking sound.

Fixed Opportunities

There is an aside in Tom Kelley’s “The Ten Faces of Innovation” called “Fixed Opportunities.”

The aside is about the flexibility of people in adapting technology to our lives: Post-its on copiers that tell us how to avoid frustrating little problems or “the handwritten sign taped to the front of the reception desk.” These are immensely important clues for the Anthropologist in an organization looking to improve on the last go around. They can even be hints that a market is being underserved or not served at all.

Kelley challenges us to spend a day noting all of these fixes we encounter. I was still finishing the paragraph when my brain wandered to thinking about any that I encounter regularly. I couldn’t think of any, so I finished reading the aside and looked up from the page. There, just below my monitor at work, the person who had last occupied my desk had cut off a stack of about ten post-its so that only the sticky strips remained and placed the one thick strip over a distracting and unnecessary green LED.

The hunt is on.

Abduction

Not of the extra-terrestrial sort, but a kind of logic.

Roger Martin, in The Business of Design, suggests that most businesses are run by two forms of logic, deductive and inductive. These two ways of reasoning have been extremely dominant ways of thinking for the body politic since the Renaissance, as far as I can tell. Progression of knowledge and creativity has been the result of a select few great minds fighting tooth and nail against the prevailing wisdom of past experience and status quo.

As an alternative to the stifling bog of pessimism and resignation, Martin suggests abductive reasoning, a sort of guessing we do all the time.

A simple definition of each form of logic:

• DEDUCTIVE: from the general evidence to the specific conclusion
• INDUCTIVE: from the specific observation to the general, probable, principle
• ABDUCTIVE: explanatory, economical hypothesis derived from observation of phenomena

Deductive and inductive logic are great for the refining and honing of current knowledge, for iterative development. They start with existing knowledge (whether specific or general) and derive a course of action from there. The next step is always taken from the current point of departure, where you are already standing. The sales figures say the these cars sell well and those do not. Therefore, we should make more of these (deduction). Or we observe that people are buying minivans, so we should produce more minivans (induction).

Here's the kicker: neither of these will get you a car that both sells well and has never been on the market before.

Abductive logic differs from the other two forms of logic in that it affords possibility. We can hear that people are grumbling about their vehicles, and we can make inferences and build solutions based on the needs of car-owners and drivers that has little or nothing to do with what cars they have owned in the past or currently own.

This form of logic affords validity, and does not exclusively prefer reliability. Reliability is an inherent part of abductive reasoning because abduction is also a form of simplification. We choose the simplest, or most economical, solution out of infinite possibilities because it "makes the most sense." We are extremely good at this and need only to consciously foster its development.

The Business of Design

I'm reading "The Design of Business" by Roger Martin.

The basic idea is that most businesses spend all of their energy and resources on refining whatever successes they have already had, exploiting the same product, tweaking what is essentially the same service.

I recently heard Robert Reich and Michael Porter talking about the dominant force in business over the last few decades which they say has been shareholder value. Martin points out that market analysts, however ludicrous, prefer that a stock's value come in according to projections rather than exceed them. This is because exceeded expectations signals that the company is behaving in ways that are not measurable, not predictable. The behavior of companies that produces industry leadership, long-term profits, long-term stability, and customer loyalty is precisely the type of behavior that is frowned upon through institutional incentives, shoddy market analysis, and poor business education.

Interestingly, the type of design thinking that affords business strength is practically laughed out of the room in favor of less profitable "reliability".

Back to Michael Porter, he was stating that the leading business thinkers today are seeing the need for a paradigm shift away from shareholder value and toward shared value as the key to goal development and the prime measure of success. Supposedly, this takes into account all of what were previously deemed externalities and incorporates them into the business model. This shift is due to the potential profits to be found in being responsible (both having and eating cake). Reich disagrees, saying that he has seen corporate institutions repeatedly go billions of dollars out of their way to find loopholes and continue to exploit externality-driven business plans in spite of the numbers on the table.

Whether or not Porter is right, these are exciting times for the redefinition of business and value. These things take time.

EATING

Caitlin made banana bread this morning and I said the bananas weren't ripe enough to do so. The bread was still good with plentiful banana flavor. Oh, how wrong was I.

Baking bread and interaction design

On baking bread:

From Outlaw Cook, p.215

Why, then, would anyone prefer a natural leavening? In response, it might be argued that at the very center of the artisanal process is not so much insistence on fine ingredients nor mastery of any particular method, but rather a willingness to assume personal responsibility for the thing made. Paradoxically, this means surrendering control, for there can be no responsibility without risk of failure. But willingness to assume that risk restores the baker’s artisanal status even as it offers the possibility of creating an incomparably crusty and full-flavored loaf.

This reminds me of a passage from one of the guest authors in Thoughts on Interaction Design that talks about how to best insert oneself, as a designer, into a company’s existing processes and workflows. She said that this is a process of finding opportunities to do good work on small projects, documenting that work, and then using that documentation to get bigger jobs with more responsibility. But, she says, in order to have an appropriate amount of responsibility (quite a bit), you must have some skin in the game, as Alan Cooper puts it. A certain risk of failure must be present to legitimize both one’s own sense of responsibility and others’ perception of your responsibility.

Now, about surrendering control… I believe this means that we must approach interaction design projects each one uniquely. We cannot rely solely on heuristic solutions, especially on the first go-around, lest we encourage mediocre interactions. Each solution, each loaf, must be designed (or baked) according to the specific constraints (or weather conditions) of the project. In that way, the risk is increased giving credence to one’s role as designer even as the potential value of the interaction is augmented significantly.


p.223

Our culture, so imaginative in finding ways to innovate, is not so inspired in finding a way to sustain a commitment to providing excellence in humble necessities. Indeed, sometimes it seems to conspire against it.