“slow” in “slow innovation”

A nice read in the last issue of Design Mind (by Frog Design): “Slow Innovation: Good ideas take a long time to perfect” by David Hoffer.

Taking various examples (from Edison’s cylinder phonograph invented in 1877 to its plateau-ed end in 1910 or the 80 years duration of vinyls), the author shows that there seems to be 30-plus year innovation cycles and variations. This topic is of course highly explored in the literature about the diffusion of innovation (see for instance the work by Everett Rogers). The article sums up some of the results from this literature. See for example the discussion about the users’ roles in innovation (“echnology may be advancing quickly, but that doesn’t mean humans have the interest or the aptitude to adopt it right away“). But more importantly, it’s the implications for business that are the most relevant here:

“For businesses, slow is often a pejorative term, but slow innovation isn’t always a bad thing. Slow change can give entrenched industries a chance to gather their thoughts and respond effectively. Is it possible that a 19th-century buggy-whip company, faced with declining sales, started fashioning steering wheel covers, gearshift handle caps, and leather seating in cars? If not, they should have, thereby turning extinction into evolution. Businesses looking to innovate must always be paying attention to disruptions (and perhaps even doing a little disrupting of their own).“

Why do I blog this? updating the material I use for the courses I will give this semester about innovation, user research and foresight.

Spacewar

Steve russell, quoted by Steward Brand, in the legendary Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums published in Rolling Stones in 1972:

“We had this brand new PDP-l, it was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display. Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-Dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships.
(…)
I had just finished reading Doc Smith’s Lensman series. He was some sort of scientist but he wrote this really dashing brand of science fiction.
(…)
By picking a world which people weren’t familiar with, we could alter a number of parameters of the world in the interests of making a good game and of making it possible to get it onto a computer. We made a great deal of compromises from some of our original grand plans in order to make it work well“

Why do I blog this? various intriguing things here: people trying to find applications for the weird new device that sits in their research lab, the importance of talk-and-try, the influence of sci-fi in the researchers’ imaginary realms and game design as random tuning. Of course, there is more to draw in the whole piece. Reminds me of some situations, please replace “PDP-l” by whatever technological stuff you have in mind, and “Doc Smith’s Lensman” by any cool sci-fi from either the Zeitgeist or the shiny past we never reached and you may encounter a similar situation.

Externalist, internalists and contextualists

The general attitude wrt to technologies when you read press or overhear café du commerce conversations is that cell phones, the information super-highway, the Wikipedia or the invention of the wheel cause automatic and inherent “impacts”. People talk about how X or Z (replace X and Z by whatever tech you might be interested in) is reshaping our cities or creating new neural networks in our brains. Worse this kind of saying also make people think that technology pursue its own goals; in french people are use to say “On arrête pas le progrès” (“We can’t stop progress”), as if techniques were some sort of autonomous being, creating its own necessity and leading to its own design outside society.

David Nye in his chapter “Technology” gives a very interesting (and quick) overview of theories that concern the relationships between technologies and culture. Although he accounts that old theories by McLuhan which described automatic impacts of technology are passé and fallen into disfavor, Nye highlights how the press and certain engineering researchers make deterministic utopian claims that technology is a “natural” force. In his overview, he describes 3 possibles approaches: externalist, internalist, and contextualist.

“Externalists examine a machine or technology within a cultural system or ambience, including studies of the reception of new machines, examinations of workers’ response to new methods of production, comparative work on technology transfer, or studies of how a new machine or process changes hierarchical relations or social practices. In such approaches, the technical characteristics of machines usually are treated as subsidiary matters, and in some cases (but by no means all) technology may again seem a deterministic force.

Internalists reconstruct the history of machines and processes, with an emphasis on the role of the inventor, laboratory practices, and the state of scientific knowledge at a particular time. They chart the sequence that leads from one physical object to the next. (…) In contrast to the general public who often believe that “necessity is the mother of invention,” internalists frequently find that inventions were not initially perceived as needed.
(…)
most technology scholars now tend toward contextualism; they see machines as integral parts of the social world. If technologies are shaped by the concerns of society, at the same time they have a reciprocal, transformative effect on the world around them. For contextualists, technology is not merely a system of machines with certain functions; it is deeply embedded in the social construction of reality. Technologies are not implacable forces moving through history; they are inseparable from social processes that vary from one time period to another and from one culture to another.“

I don’t know whether this classification is accepted in the field but I found quite convenient to get a summary like this, which makes sense of past readings in sociology and anthropology.
Why do I blog this? I have worked in the externalist frameworks in my undergraduate studies, and I’ve moved from this to more contextualists paradigms during my PhD but it was still very externalist. Especially if I judge form the vocabulary I use, or that I had to use because it was part of an HCI program in which cognitive sciences was important (and cognitive psychology is clearly not contextualist, in its most rigourous inception). Now I have clearly a more complete overview (not only with Nye but the ton of other books and papers by Latour, Simondon and others) and definitely use another vocabulary. And I try to take that into account in my work, be it when writing about locative media, teaching design research, organizing the LIFT conference or working on field studies.

Internet pervasiveness in Peru

The omnipresence of internet cafés and network game shops is incredible in Peru. Even on the Altiplano, around 3800m, far from tourist footprints, you can get fast internet connections. The vocabulary of these is also fantastic: “speedy internet”, “speedy veloz”, etc.

Coupled with cafés, laudromats, drugstore, baby clothes and other curious things, it’s stuning to see connected areas where people don’t even have access to water and sewage.

Thinking about other communication services like the llamadas, it’s interesting to note how technologically-mediated interactions are important in that part of South America. I found it more apparent in Peru than in Brasil for example.

Old but still with a future

Not that I am interested by car technology but this article in The Economist tackles how the internal combustion engine, a 100 years old technology, is not dead at all and still has a future. That quote struck me as particularly relevant:

“Old technologies have a habit of fighting back when new ones come along. This is not surprising because they often have an enormous amount of design, engineering and production knowledge invested in them“

Why do I blog this? reading a lot about the history of science and techniques lately, I find interesting to observe the evolution of technologies. Resurgence of certain techniques and services are always intriguing, especially as they force people to think about contextual factors (see the surging interest in coal mine lately caused by rising pricing of energy).

The relevance of “past futures”

“Technological Landscapes” by Richard Rogers is an essay about “relevant past futures”, i.e the “past roads not taken”, in which he invites us to re-read the history of technological culture “to inform the selection of the technological landscapes of our day”:

“Historical comparison with imagery of previous technological landscapes fires the imagination. It is also the stuff of argument and defence for an idea or a project
(…)
The rationale to looking closely into the early history of current dominant systems relates (…) to challenging the commonplace idea that the marketplace sorts out the ‘best’ technology and that the consumer and society are the beneficiaries. (…) the ‘alternatives paths’ or ‘roads not taken’ historians examine the effects on society (and increasingly the environment) of having lost a potentially viable system – technology opportunity cost.

After mentioning some examples such as FM radio, Rogers goes on with:

“When new and ‘better’ technological systems are trumpeted, it is worth recalling these and other specific examples of lost battles, from the level of abstractions of craft versus mass production down to that of keyboard layout. In confronting better technologies of the future, the question always remains ‘better for whom’?“

And then some more elaborate thoughts about how past futures are used or can be relevant:

“The Nineties [case for space exploration] also shows us how earlier models (relevant pasts) are employed as ‘guides’ to make current futuristic cases more compelling. To make a case for a futuristic technological project, the promoter often must finds ‘usable pasts’ or indeed ‘usable past futures’.
(…)
We learn the past futures for at least two reason. They aid us in thinking through the ideals, principles and social relations which have been and could be reflected in and designed into our technologies, bringing within our grasp the ability to ‘imagine alternative technological designs’ and act accordingly. Secondly, comparison is the stuff of case building. Drawing the right parallel (or spotting the spurious analogy) is one step in proposing or opposing particular cases to be made for new technology and new forms of decision-making on technology.“

Why do I blog this? collecting material for a project about technological failures. I am interested in the role of failures in foresight and design. Rogers describes some pertinent ideas about how failed futures can frame design, and the intrinsically political imaginary realm of this practice.

What it takes to organize a conference

There’s a topic I rarely discuss here: how we work on the program of the LIFT conferences. With 3 editions in Geneva, a small event in Seoul and the LIFT Asia in CheJu next september, a long list of speakers has been booked. Since I am in charge of that part, it’s always interesting to shed some light about we handle that part of the conference.

So how does that work? Well, it’s not so much of a formal process as it’s a combination of the LIFT coreteam daily observation of the Tech world and a discussion with members from our board as well as local advisers. The daily dose of newsfeeds, magazine reads, meetings with researchers, designers, entrepreneurs, public institutions lead us to add names of relevant people in a database we called “LIFT parking”. This is mostly coordinated by myself and approved by the coreteam with recommendations coming from the LIFT team, the LIFT board, some partners/friends who reads specific resources (and get a free subscription and LIFT entrance) and of course local contacts who keep us posted about who is intriguing, pertinent and interesting in other part of the world such as South Korea, China, Japan. In the future we’d like to open this to new contacts from other countries in Latin America and of course Africa. Finally, the suggestion part of the website allows people from the community to suggest names and topics.

7-8 month before the event, we start cobbling our notes, potential speaker names and list of topics so that we can discuss the main theme and subtopics for the conference. This allows us to narrow down the list of potential speakers. Board members also suggest speakers at this time.

Why “future perfect” is what it is

Quite enjoyed reading future perfect’s rationale in this interview:

“Your blog Future Perfect (“about the collision of people, society and technology”) includes a lot of your musings about what you see on your travels, but poses more questions that it answers.

I’m pretty bad at shoehorning life into what amounts to lifeless journal and conference submissions. I mean, how do you take the essence of what’s out there, the richness of life, and put it on paper? I don’t think you can. The motivation behind the blog is that I do something that totally fascinates me, and I’m lucky to be well resourced and to work with very talented people. I want to be able to communicate some of that. It’s not about saying what the answers are; it’s about asking the questions and maybe some of those will stick in people’s minds and they’ll ask those questions in their own contexts.“

Why do I blog this? it’s always interesting to get people’s motivation behind what they’re doing… Also, I like the idea of “asking questions” to inform design.

Innovation versus Invention

Innovation vs. Invention by Bill Buxton is short but really full of great insights that sums up lots of interesting ideas about innovation.

First about the innovation process:

“the difference between ‘innovation’ and ‘invention’. The closer one gets to Route 128 in Boston and Silicon Valley, the more it seems that people confuse the two. Too often the obsession is with ‘inventing’ something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative understanding of what is already known. Too often ,the obsession is with ‘inventing’something totally unique, rather than extracting value from the creative.
(…)
The key thing to note is that the average time from invention to market was 20-plus years. So much for fast moving tech sector! Which brings us to one of the most insightful quotes that I have encountered, from
William Gibson: “The future is already here. It is just not uniformly distributed.” Here is the business lesson: innovation is far more about prospecting, mining, refining and adding value to ‘gold’ than it is
about alchemy. Rather than focusing on the invention of the ‘brand new’, one might better strive for creative insights on how to combine, develop and leverage“

Then about design:

“So now we come to the big debate: who is a designer, and who should be a designer? Don Norman.It has an epilogue entitled, “We Are All Designers”. To this I say, “Nonsense!”
(…)
it was not enough to simply have great ideas.If you wanted the ideas to come to fruition,you had to spend as much time directing your innovation and creativity to fostering a culture of creativity and a receptiveness to innovation within the company, as you spend on the ideas themselves. “

Why do I blog this? preparing a course for tomorrow about foresight and innovation in a french design school.

btw I’ve a french blog

After 5 years blogging in english, and considering that part of my network (friends, colleagues, clients, etc.) are french, I found interesting to experiment with a blog en français. Since I don’t have tons of time, i picked up a tumblr and chose to post short things when I have time, some similar to here, some different depending on my mood. It’s called +41nteraction and will revolved around the same thing as P&V.