Design_at_the_edge

City Walls may be great for elites to exert control

Chester 2006: Chester Wall
Originally uploaded by orangeacid

Bruce Nassbaum has written here

"Look around and you see people putting up silos around social media. Invitation-only social networks like doostang.com and customized corporate vitual worlds are blossoming. FaceBook folks are putting digital "doors" on their pages, controlling who can enter and for what purpose.

Is the golden age of truly open social networking in decline, as the young race to hide their youthful digital discretions and the rest of us tire of communicating with the masses and return to our own social/economic/political circles?

Yes, I know Twitter is very hot and runs counter to this trend. Yet, something is happening at the same time. Walls are going up. Something is cooking."

I remember working in a company division that was going from a local, country-based organisation to a European-based one. It involved all departments along the value-chain from development through manufacturing and marketing to logistics and suppliers. One of the technology enablers for this change project was the first version of Lotus Notes, enabling groups to set up their own communication and database for each project and interest group. At the same time we were trying to rein in costs so the travel budget was cut.

Picture uploaded by DMBFreakNo41. Used with thanks under CC.

In a matter of months we went from a set of local innovation projects that involved interested countries who would meet regularly in centres around Europe to swap information on progress and discuss how they could contribute or lead part of the action to a city state mentality where if you were on the periphery of a project and it was not obvious you should be in the list of people who could access the particularly Notes Conference as we called them.. you were out. Whereas I would meet people from, say, Italy in my local (British) canteen and be able to join in the lunchtime discussion and offer the services of my group to help with their current problem, I now found out by accident when visiting a supplier who might mention the Italian job they were involved in. I would come back to base, phone around the italian company and eventually convince someone to put me on the authorisation for the Notes Conference. Eventually people gave up and projects increasingly went wrong which encouraged people to be less open but feel more in control; totally opposite to the intention of the technology, reorganisation and common sense.

It is almost as if the elite club of those who are in start looking in and exclude those on the outside. Also the perceived uncertainties of being open to (almost) anyone can be very great and without facilitation and moderation the reason for wanting to be in can be seen to be of less value than staying out, and avoiding the possibilty of conversations that might be less than useful. It reminds me of the model that Matt Taylor created for the knowledge management process here

and which helped me reframe my thinking about how Notes applications should be redesigned, which meant thinking about the overall innovation ecosystem.

Perhaps we should think of physical analogies to FaceBook, etc. Why do we go to social spaces like this?

Picture Uploaded by wonderferret. Used with thanks under CC.

We arrive at a pub or club hoping to have a drink, nibbles, company, enjoy some good conversation, learn something interesting, share something. If its not working out we can slide into another conversation or even go elsewhere. We might even find people come with us to hopefully discover something more interesting somewhere else......or they might choose not to take up the invite as they can't see the point

Does the system we use on the web help hinder or enhance this, what are the downsides? My gut feel is the systems are not complete enough to serve as a platform. A good pub is likely to have something or someone who is larger than life to act as a Strange Attractor - 'something unique that is also compelling'.

There is also a bit of bio chemistry of space that is necessary ..what Rich Gold called Wet Space (hopefully in his book 'Plenitude' just published,my copy not arrived yet; just arrived..no its not!).. In Rich's words:

"What is a “wet space”? Well this room ( in which Gold was delivering lecture) is a wet space. You can smell, touch, feel each other; Pheromones and hormones are swirling; Very “mammal” - pack formations, leaders; Lots of gossip."

Social applications are not Wet Spaces but are what Rich called Damp Spaces..and maybe  occasionally Dry Space.... in his words:

"Dampness is new, only since the telegraph (though I get arguments). You are alone in your room; But you are connected via mediating technologies to one or more other people. Hence it has both wet and dry properties......

Damp spaces are “prophylactic” in that they don’t allow everything through. This makes them MORE and not less valuable than wet spaces. The communicative act itself becomes more designed and can actually become art. "

So where does this leave us with respect to social networks? Like being in a pub, the users want to be in control of themselves and who they socialise with. They don't expect the pub owner to tell people at one end of the bar who they have heard about at the other end. When the social space owner decides to broadcast everything heard to anyone they run the risk of everybody uprooting and moving to another pub where descretion is the norm. Webbed social applications need to remember how damp they need to be to attract and retain customers- its the total experience that counts.

The interesting thing is "Do we have two or more personas, say one for work projects and one for private activities? Or do we just decide to be 'me'"

Martin Varsavsky has some thoughts on social networks here and his site is an example of openness?

The Timesonline article Lecturers intrude in MySpace includes:

".... prospective undergraduates feel underwhelmed by efforts to communicate with them via online technology such as MySpace and YouTube, according to a survey of sixth-formers by Ipsos MORI. Students regard the virtual world as a place for entertainment, socialising and information-gathering. “[Young people] seem to take the view: ‘This is our space - don’t invade it’,” says Charles Hutchings, market research manager for the Joint Information Systems Committee that commissioned the survey. Students have an “inability to see how things like online social networking can tie in with learning”, he says."

At the end of the day it seems that context is important -same as it ever was...same as it ever was.

I guess my context is I am interested in how we design more innovative innovation networks;  but hang on Rich Gold stated

"Design is the most successful social science ever created."

[since writing this Bramble this interesting blog from Dave Pollard has appeared]

Design Space and information!?

information!?
Originally uploaded by POSITiv

The tagging of nuggets of digital data and the rise of tools to turn nuggets into informative arrays of stimulation has enhanced the capability of teams that play and interact with those nuggets. We discussed conceptually possible configurations of data and information and how the rate of entry into Design Space can itself be informative. So waht ways can we play with all this "stuff"? The rise of Flickr and that class of web software points the way to a possible path.

Consider a collection of visual data around the faces of Design Space. If we are in the early stages of the innovation project we may be wading through consumer data. One way of stimulating creative interactions is to bring up the data like wallpaper, gather round it and start interacting. As a prototype we might look round for what is available and see if we can do a "Wizard of Oz".  There is a Flickr complementor called oSkope which enables us to progress down that "yellow brick road", So suppose we want to be stimulated by the experience that Nike and Apple have designed, let us search with tags Nike, iPod, Runner

We might try to write a narrative round the pictures to tease out any interesting perspectives.

Later in the process we might wish to look at the consumer face, so first we bring up a  broad view of the information we have ammassed

We see a cluster of interesting information, so we zoom in on that

One picture captures our attention so we zoom in to interrogate the source

Which we can access here

Having collected some more knowledge around are target consumers we can resume exploring

Now we can discuss how useful the software has been and how we can incorporate the benefits into the bigger picture.

Let's Face(book) it we need to match tools to the tasks

The Boston Park Plaza Hotel
Originally uploaded by QiHui Zhang

In February, 2001 I presented at Daratech 2001 Conference, in the Boston Park Plaza Hotel,about the interaction of Design Processes and Technologies for packaging design in a global company. I was amused to find the hotel had been built with a large exhibition/ conference hall and nearby special rooms where sales executives could not only sleep but present their wares to prospective clients and customers. The successful ones would see their products being widely adopted; the less successful would rethink their approach, positioning or even their product itself in varying degrees of desperation!

I drew on the Everett Rogers theories of Innovation Diffusion, adapted it to reflect my own experiences of choosing, using and exploiting design technologies -also described here.

The S curve above illustrates my experience of how a new design technology is adopted bearing in mind the complexities of innovation at the intersection of business,technology and organisational culture. Someone will spot an emerging technology... in an article, presentation or over a beer at a conference... and will begin to talk about it in the office. The reception maybe frosty or lukewarm, but in an innovative group this will be interpreted as "I haven't got my story engaging enough to hold their attention yet." ( I know the theories say you should suspend judgement, never criticise, etc. but as we are mainly human it is better to be able to live with the paradox of story development (as a colleague put it when referring to a key report he was writing " After it returns for its thirteenth rewrite the reviewer's positive comments are a bit hard to take!").

So how do we start gaining committment? By playing.. perhaps getting the technology vendor to show you what sort of play can take place. This is almost being at the inflection point illustrated in Technology Trails to Discover. The activity will begin to draw other people in... within the group and, perhaps, within the client groups as well. This can lead to an agreement to use on a real project to tease out the benefits. Often this can be done by using the new technology in parallel to the current, so that the client feels happy that project exposure to risk is minimised.

Successful completion of this activity will create a great story and a great demonstration that can be used to energise the roll out of the technology on all key projects....and then on to the next technology!

This diagram, from my Daratech2001 presentation traced the history of Design Technology adoption so:

During the presentation I realised that we could add another line representing the locus of points on the S curves where integrating and growing was proceeding apace so I drew it like this (by the way MIT means Make Ideas Tangible):

What intrigued me was the slow down in the rate of increasing effectiveness on the right of the diagram which must mean there was a slowdown in the cultural response to the options and opportunities presented by the technology. If you look at the bottom (time) scale then it is also apparent that we are moving from individual cultural responses to the group repsonses and then a greater population of the project people... as it turns out there are increasing numbers of individual interdisciplinary, cross-functional, cross-organisational inter-relationships to cope with as we move left to right.

We are addressing the issues of moving minds of individuals to that of groups to that of organisations; analogous the moving from Sarnoff's Law through Metcalfe's to Reed's; pushing out stuff, sharing stuff, facilitating the co-creation of stuff. No wonder things were slowing down.

During this period innovation teams being drawn from functions and organisations, that were geographically dispersed, in order to co-create stuff rather than have it passed on and be tempted to value add (complicatedness approach). Tools that help the facilitation and rapid creativity when the group is together and facilitates the reinforcement of strategic vision and action whilst apart, counteracting strategy and attention decay were in short supply. Much experimentation was going on to try to understand the dynamics of these teams and how emerging technologies cold be deployed by the process facilitators to enable dramatic improvements in innovation quality.

The latest so-called Web 2.0 technologies should enable us to build significant communities that can co-create new things. Lotus Notes was a step along the road; Groove moved into a web-world and brought benefits. MySpace and FaceBook democratised social networking. It is to be hoped that the architecture of FaceBook may point us in the right direction to build significant creative behaviour in a dispersed network, but truly dynamic teams do not spontaneously arise from membership of, say, FaceBook. The social networks that arise in that environment is akin to "going down the pub or club" where you have fleeting social engagement with a large number of people and a better relationship with a few people of like interests (birds of a feather). What we are looking for are tools that will support a dynamic design processing network of disparate people who may not have chosen to be on the project but will be energised to contribute fully to it by sharing a powerful vision of the outcome... more a sort of SpaceBook application. To sum it up we are looking for technologies that enable the innovation project groups to become Dream Teams by quickly showing these observable characteristics

A strong platform of understanding

A shared vision

A creative climate

Ownership of ideas

Resilience to setbacks

Network activation

Learning from experience

Technologies that support these activities are not simple social networking applications, neither are they heavyweight enterprise systems nor are they simple, but they will exhibit simplicity. Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity, but of complicatedness. Simple building blocks can be assembled to address the challenges of complexity; innovation and design are, in fact, complex adaptive systems.... so the last thing we want is complicatedness (is that another name for bureaucracy?).

Kevin Roberts introduced me through his blog to the simplicity of visualising lyrics here

Widescreen view of the world

11:09 02 June 2007
Image(3070)

When connecting together people across the network so that they can work on a design together it is worth weighing up the bandwidth consequences of whatever task they are doing together. It is often sufficient to have a video-link to your partner that you to observe gross body movements; it is sufficient for you to know that when you are talking about something at the top right of screen to see that they are looking at bottom to know they are not fully understanding your story. In this case we need to spend time getting the other person to connect with the right position- in the story and on the screen - low resolution video-links are sufficient and can be introduced much earlier;  but this can lead to an interesting paradox:

Adam Richardson wrote about the Tyranny of Choice in the context of the iPhone, but it has resonances here.

"Just one more thought on this topic of the iPhone price drop (for which Apple is now offering to give a credit of $100 to early buyers). It occurs to me that the complaints over this may have something to do with what Barry Schwartz refers to “the tyranny of choice” (or the “paradox of choice” if you read the book version).

The iPhone price drop is an example of an opportunity cost. Schwartz talks about “maximizers” (people who constantly seek out the best possible choice, and even after making a purchase continue researching options) and “satisficers” (people who seek out a “good enough” choice and then, once made, stop looking further). In reality everyone is a mix of both, depending on the category in question, but when it comes to technology, early adopters are almost by definition maximizers. Maximizers are particularly vulnerable to the tyranny of choice, which actually tends to make them less happy overall. He says:

Several factors explain why more choice is not always better than less, especially for maximizers. High among these are “opportunity costs.” The quality of any given option cannot be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the “costs” of making a selection is losing the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. Thus, an opportunity cost of vacationing on the beach in Cape Cod might be missing the fabulous restaurants in the Napa Valley. If we assume that opportunity costs reduce the overall desirability of the most preferred choice, then the more alternatives there are, the deeper our sense of loss will be and the less satisfaction we will derive from our ultimate decision. 

For early adopters of the iPhone who have paid the “early adopter tax”, their thoughts immediately turn to all the other things they could have spent that $200 on, all those other opportunities that got passed up."

In an organisational context we need to have people who are happy to be paid for being discontented. For many years I happily lived with/in that paradox.

It was my job to pull technology "rabbits out of the hat per year!" The requirement for these design technologies was to demonstrate definite benefits in the cultural context of the innovation activity. As, in reality, we might be delivering benefits on all 5 imperatives per annum there it is necessary to chart out the future directions of the five strategic design technology imperatives.

Picture uploaded by Lincoln Imp. Used with thanks under CC.

The social consequences of uncoordinated introduction of technologies can be extremely traumatic if they are not planned out and communicated to all the stakeholders.

Picture Uploaded by Magic ]=). Used with thanks under CC.

So, it is a question of estimating how a technology will evolve within your strategic time horizon,

Picture Uploaded by littleblackcamera. Used with thanks under CC.

working back to today; then asking the question "What can we do in the next 2-3 month's? Why would we do it? What application is available that starts us along the path to the ultimate? How do we introduce, use and exploit it in the short, medium or long term? Where do we introduce it? Who will help us experiment and learn?

Picture uploaded by Clearly Ambiguous. Used with thanks under CC.

In our case we have 5 Red Arrows to manage.

strategic design technology imperatives

strategic design technology5
Originally uploaded by IC Pod

Listed here for reference.

Designing creative (design) spaces

Phone 011 020
Originally uploaded by sebastian t

A Design Space should be a space, physical, mental, virtual that reflects a creative climate where innovation teams act together to expand the range of opportunities and to nurture great ideas. These creative Design Spaces will become the incubators for the creative advantages that will enable Britain and other industrialised companies to keep ahead of the pack of lower cost producers and service providers. The concerns about bottom-line costs has driven out the "luxury" of so-called unproductive space; even meeting rooms have migrated to local hotels and conference suites who are engaged in the efficiency game and so want people out on time as there is a meeting following shortly. It is amazing how creative people can be in such circumstances but it is also true that sustained widespread creativity is unusual in such environments- it is one thing coming up with a creative solution to an issue or problem, but to discover insights, play with them, and create substantial new products and services requires more than efficiency, it requires effective actions which to a productivity expert look positively wasteful! As for radical solutions, forget it!

There is something about messiness that enhances creativity, the ability to have a notion, pick something up and play with it transforming it into an idea made tangible so that it can be shared with someone else, enhanced into the form of a concept and eventually into a new offer. So what do we need... a space to uplift the spirit, to hold stuff, to play, to share.. not your average office!

[Picture of IDEO office environment taken by jurvetson.

Used with thanks under CC.]

The capability of creative improvisational play is a devastatingly competitive advantage that is culturally informed and therefore cannot be inserted into an organisation's culture overnight. But it is well worth starting the journey that leads to the building of a creative environment, physically and virtually.

picture uploaded by Scootie. Used with thanks under CC.

I always fancied this physical space as it is in a seemingly remote area yet is half a mile from a great deal of industry... much declining,; so one can be remote space but close enough to the world to attract people prepared to make the journey. The building owners never got it though!

View Larger Map

The virtual space is constructed by connecting together people and places, displaced in space and time, so that dialogue around visual, tactile material can take place without everyone needing to be in the same place. This means going beyond the conventional view of videoconferencing to technology that enables a multipoint awareness and communication portal for connecting remote social spaces, such as iCom, the application created at MIT's MediaLab in the Object Based Media Group.

[Picture links].

Why link spaces in a visual (and audio) sense? Because of what I call the phenomena of "noises off". When working together in a creative space it is often that one hears a snatch of a nearby conversation and thinking 'I can add value to that,' wander across and join in. One day I popped out of my office to have a word with one of the designers, but he was chatting on the phone. I returned to my office and the phone rang. It was a design manager from an external agency. "Hello," he said " I saw you were in so I thought I would give you a call."

"Oh!" Said I, "I did not realise you were up here in the lab."

"I'm not," he replied "I'm in the office in London but I saw you nip into the office on the video camera... your designer and mine are on a video-call, I'm keeping an eye on things and I saw you walk past in the background, so I grabbed the phone!"

So we had gone beyond the conventional video-conference that connects faces to an application that connects spaces too! and it turned out to be a very important part of the design technology mix.

with dynamic information included. see a video of iCom here.

The building should be designed to contain all the technologies and physical spaces necessary for the support and nurture of a project team whilst they are "on-site" and also whilst dispersed geographically.

If as Rich Gold put it "Design is the most successful social science ever created."  then the best tools are those that facilitate and enhance the interactions between the team people. It is not unreasonable to think of the building itself as a meta technology, a Design Space that facilitates and underpins the efforts of the design team.

So the two technologies described here are part of our Design Technology thrust:

5. Collaborative Infrastructure.

We will no doubt return to discuss the topic again!