Design_at_the_edge

A peep into the future

A peep into the future
Originally uploaded by timtom.ch

'Virtually any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next five to 10 years has already been around for about 10 years,' Bill Buxton said. So our challenge must be: how do we stumble across them?

The Christmas edition of The Economist in 'Face value' writes about the accidental innovator Evan Williams; extracts below

"AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights.......

"So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious............

So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?

.....All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question......He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious ......

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things."

Depending on your point of view we too could have had the idea for Twitter if we blogged a lot and used SMS a great deal and saw that a lot of the traffic is about 'What are you doing?"' Our iPhone could then 'twit' at us.

The Economist September 2003 Technology Quarterly introduction refers to Carl Franklin (Why Innovation Fails) and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky (Creativity in Product Innovation) and writes of how to Expect the unexpected citing the highest innovation success rate as Random event spotting (92.9% successes), whilst referring to several techniques including Evan Williams mental tricks referred to above.

Twitter is interesting as it has proved to be a valid idea (some consumers like it) whilst its overall success is not proven yet as it has not demonstrated viability ( will it make money-directly or indirectly- for its producers?). Winning products and services are a balancing act between validity and viability; risk taking is allowing valid ideas to travel long enough to confirm, or otherwise, the viability of the tangible outcome of that original energising insight or idea. Many established organisations would have killed Twitter by now, but look at the odds of success in Designs on innovation.

The challenge for successful actions energised by the discovery of consumer  insights that become winning innovation is not to look around us but to travel in unfamiliar territory, to look from different points of view, reflect on what we observe and recognise in other words as William Gibson put it

Picture uploaded by david.alliet . Used with thanks under CC.

"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."

He finds small groups of people doing revolutionary things and then imagines what it would be like if everybody was doing those things.

So our 2008 challenge is going the location of what is unevenly distributed, and on reflection knowing we have been there!

Picture uploaded by Joe Shlabotnik . Used with thanks under CC.

Presence: Paris Cafe- Manchester Cafe

Paris _ From Metro Cafe
Originally uploaded by ktylerconk

I remember, about 8 years ago, using my first hands-free (rare in those days) earpiece in my new Nokia Phone. I was on my way to a meeting in Manchester when a colleague, Chris, called me to check a few things on a project we were working on.
"Hello Chris. Where are you?" I said
"I'm just turning off the Champs Elysees on the way to a meeting I can see a cafe ahead .... can I stop and check a few things with you?"
"Okay, I am passing Waterstones bookshop and they have a coffeeshop so I'll go in there."
We carried on chatting and I arrived at the counter and asked "What are you drinking?" "Cappuccino," came the prompt reply. "I'll have the same... medium please." Double take from the barrista "Oh cappuccino, I mean" I responded and went to sit.
When the barrista delivered the coffee she looked at me quizzically and I said I was on the phone to my friend in a cafe in Paris and showed the earpiece. She smiled and I carried on with the Paris discussion.
I tell this as an insightful moment when I realised that roaming communication made "Where are you" a more useful opener than "How are you" of a fixed point receiver. Clues about where, and what you are up to are useful too.. (see example of 'Noises Off' here ).

I have been observing the technologies develop that enable mobile phone design evolution, the support infrastructures, camera image quality, application software, etc. that could enable a system to evolve, and it looks like it is almost here... not from the telecomms giants but from the computing industry.. Apple's iPhone, which is almost good enough, web browsing on said device and Jaiku (which is not yet on the device). So we almost have a product that delivers the right affordance for the consumer experience but not quite.. the experience is right for making a call, browsing the web and tantalisingly close for a collsborstive experience that I look for in a task oriented scenario. The feedback such as 'I love my iPhone but....bah no Jaiku!' from Tim O'Reilly could make sure the next iteration of iPhone moves in the 'right' direction. See also the diagram in the blog 'Technology trails to discover'

The intriguing thing here is how we make sure that the insight and ideas for a possible solution are acted on and not rejected. There are work arounds as the comments to Tim O'Reilly's blog discusses but they show there is a consumer problem to be fixed which means there is an valid innovation opportunity which needs to be prototyped to enable the viability to be established. So MAKE philosophy is part of the iterative capital Michael Schrage describes that enables teams to deliver meaningful innovative "things"- products, services, experiences. that are both valid for the consumer and viable for the providing organisation.