A quote by Alex Manu (Ontario College of Art and Design) referenced by Bill Buxton in “Sketching the User Experience” – pp 263
- Alan Kay
This is not only true for the designer or engineer, but for the management team and business unit that surround them. It calls for a distribution of creativity. A creative ecosystem.
Here is the Simpson’s spoof of the classic “Powers of 10″ short film by illustrious designers Charles and Ray Eames.
Trippy stuff….and IMO a healthy mental stretch. Cognitive yoga. The film, which was noted as culturally significant by the Library of Congress, is detailed on Wikipedia here.
It was this film that inspired Will Wright to design his equally mind expanding game Spore. Listen here for a discussion between Brian Eno and Will Wright. A delightfully meandering chat about how they use generative systems in their creative works. which finally gets around to discussing Spore.
But back to Charles and Ray Eames. This film is not what they are most famous for. Perhaps their most significant contribution (or at least their most famous) is the Eames Lounge Chair. It shows up everywhere, for instance if you look at the set of Fraser, that “sophisticated New Yorker” has one.
Directors will use furniture like this to make a particular statement about the characters or the setting. Another common one is the Aeron showing up in sci-fi films or “hip/creative” places.
This is piece of design history I’m sorely tempted to buy – I’ve been thinking about it for years 
.
Nice snippet on Agile process that Doug Wright picked up at his Rails conference last week:
Doug just alerted me to the source…he was paraphrasing Stuart Halloway of Relevance, a great Rails developer who was previously a big figure in the Java developer world.
A design communicator (DC) works with an interaction designer (ID) as a full-time thought partner to interview users, develop personas, generate scenarios and requirements, and create design solutions. They also facilitate collaboration with engineers, product marketing, and other related disciplines.
While the interaction designer leads the creation of design solutions, the design communicator leads the evolution of those solutions by synthesizing information, evaluating prototypes with target users, and, finally, documenting the design for efficient and precise implementation.
In addition to facilitating quality work, the design communicator makes the work go faster, helping the individual designer iterate ideas rapidly, and helping broader teams collaborate efficiently.
Writing has never been more powerful. The advent of new forms of media (digital video, audio, animation etc) has not diluted the raw power of text. On the contrary, text is king. Consider the billions of email flying around the world each day. The web is mostly text. Consider what media you use the most. How often do you edit a video, compared to dashing of an email? How often do you communicate in video at all? I depict concepts a lot. I embed these visual diagrams in many things I write. But despite being overtly visual, my picture quota pales in comparison to how much text I produce. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a platitude that has been bulstered and amplified by Moore’s law.
I’m reading a book at the moment called “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser. A classic guide to writing non-fiction…up there in the New York Time’s opinion with “The Elements of Style.” Lesson number one, reduce clutter. Removing words adds clarity and power to what you write. Saying less delivers more.
I like this. It’s why Haiku so arresting.
I have renamed my blog – the “Mental Model” the new title refers to comes from this concept:
Much of Kurzweil’s thinking is predicated by two socio-technological game-changers he assures us are coming down the pike. AI (Artificial Intelligence) and to compete with that, IA (Intelligence Amplification). Coming? Well, they’re already here to a greater or lesser degree – it’s just as William Gibson puts it, the future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed.
On the IA front – we don’t have to get so glam as to postulate matrix like implants in the back of the brain stem, cyber extensions allowing us to offload processing like a CPU does to the graphics card. Not at all. IA is all around us, and has been for a long time. I think you could argue (at one extreme) that it all kicked off with pencils, or similar primitive writing devices. Getting our subjective thoughts out of our heads and down on paper (or rock wall, or stone tablet) objectified our plans…gave them solidity, allowing us to spring board from them onto higher crevices up that cliff of complexity. Hard to get too far down the logical mathematical path without something to jot your formulas down with. Some have argued that it was the advent of writing itself that saw human kind get it together enough to pull off a trick as awe inspiring as the first city states. It’s a reasonable argument.
But anyhow, pencils! Intelligence Amplification….come on! There must be something more exciting that that?. Well, I’d say spreadsheets! Severely empowering, even (or especially) when you have poor mental arithmetic. The squiggly red line under words telling me they are spelt incorrectly (and green when me grammar is broke). Of course there is Google…but these examples are all a little prosaic, no? Prosaic because they have snuck up on us slowly. We’ve assimilated them like the Borg…the red squiggly line and Google box is somehow figuratively wired into my brain – a surrogate helper that I no longer notice (except when it’s gone- and then, like oxygen leaving the room, I realize how dependent I am on my IA props).
But today! Today I had the most visceral intelligence-amplification experience I can remember! And I need to write about it now, whilst it’s still fresh, before it fades into the norm – as it will, no doubt in about 24 hours. This really was pronounced…it was like I dialled the operator in the matrix and said “Tank, get me the LA freeway program, I need it now!”
Today I dropped into LAX. The US is where I’ll be living for the foreseeable future. Aliso Viejo actually, Orange County – about 20 minutes from Laguna Beach. Those who know me might charitably describe me as a little geographically challenged. Travelling to new places, especially when you have to hire a car, and negotiate a new world of everybody unilaterally driving on the wrong side of the road, always adds up to a mild (or normally extreme) amount of anxiety when coupled with navigating accurately across some strange and hostile town to a hotel.
And hostile is how it feels, or rather, how it felt….because today with my rental car, Avis dropped in a GPS In-Car-Navigation system. It’s hard to explain the emotional shift this device afforded me. Hard to explain because it was so complete, so transformative, so pronounced. Calm, pure Zen like driving calm. Rather than the stress and constant straining to concentre on maps, signs, the right hand side of the road, the ever encroaching fear of sunset when it all just gets harder…none of this. Instead a polite (and unnervingly sexy in fact) sounding voice just told me where and when to turn. A little map genie, inside a 2” black box stuck to my windscreen.
Normally I’m so freaked about getting lost I choose the most obvious route – the thickest line on the map – hoping that equates out to the biggest and most obvious signposts along the way. Doesn’t matter to me if it’s twice the distance, that time difference pales into comparison with getting lost.
But not today. Today I meandered joyously through the most circuitous tiki-tour of LA, or so it seemed. It was like riding a grand concrete roller coaster of overpasses and beautiful curving on ramps and off ramps. I had no idea where I was. Absolutely none. LA somewhere, that was all I needed to know – and it was fantastic. No stress, no anxiety – none of the usual travel angst. My reassuring little navigator – in her calm, sexy voice: Go left here, go right here. Stay on course here…you’re good….everything is OK, you’re not lost whilst I’m here with you, stuck to your windshield.
I was free to wander the unending tangle of freeways. If one on ramp looked better than the next, she’d simply, obediently, and politely acknowledge her clueless driver had gone astray, a “Recalculating Journey…” message appeared on the screen…her lips were silent.
And here, you see, is the point. This little black box is the most profound experience of intelligence-amplification I have ever encountered…in fact, I can’t put my finger on when I have ever consciously encountered a feeling of IA before. It’s always been subtle. But not today, it was like all of a sudden some inserted an omniscient navigator into my brain. I’d instantly become really really geographically intelligent. And that translated directly into freedom. Freedom…and emotional calm. The future is here now….and if you want to feel like Tank’s just downloaded one of those matrix programs to your brain, go get one of these gadgets. It’s weirdly exhilarating.
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