Disruption Archives - Near Future Laboratory

Corner Convenience // The Near Future // Design Fiction

We did a Design Fiction workshop as a kind of follow on to the Convenience newspaper. Our idea was to take the observation that the trajectory of all great innovations is to asymptotically trend towards the counter of your corner convenience store, grocer, 7-11, gas station, etc. Discerning the details as to why this occurs isn’t our primary concern. It’s an observation that tells some stories about convenience as a cultural aspiration of some sort, broadly; it’s a way of talking about industrialization, capital, the trajectory of “disruptive innovations”; it’s a way of talking about the things we take for granted that we wouldn’t were convenience to go away in some sort of puff of apocalyptic dust; it identifies the net present value of things as 99¢ and buy 1 get 1 free.

But that was the newspaper version that took the things today and made them plain. (You can get a PDF of it here.) It also serves as the conceptual set-up for what we did next which was for Nick Foster and I to tramp to Tempe Arizona to the Emerge event at ASU in order to run a workshop that would take the Corner Convenience as our site to do a bit of Design Fiction gonzo filmmaking. We imagined the Corner Convenience in some Near Future.

A couple of notes about the production of these films, but also the production of Design Fiction films generally. As the genre progresses — and it is progressing like crazy, which is fantastic — and evolves as a way to do design and make things rather than just film them, systems and structures and processes get informally put into place. I’m talking about things like styles and conventions and the visual language of Design Fictions. I’m attentive to these because it becomes useful in a Bruce Block sort of way to make use of the developing visual language and genre conventions.

One thing I notice is the way that now, early on in evolution of Design Fiction, tools have determined, or perhaps over-determined, what gets made to count as Design Fiction. Contemporary visual effects tools and software are incredibly sophisticated at what they do. I think they may have a tendency to over-determine the filmmaking. By that I mean to say that, now that we can do desktop motion capture, planar tracking, and animation in scenes — we end up with Design Fiction of surfaces as screen interfaces as if that’s the future of interaction. Which it might be, but seriously — what else? At the same time, things like green screen which is effectively a drop-down menu item in AfterEffects, or the insertion of CAD rendered objects composited seamlessly into scenes with (almost) drop-down menu item workflows, etc. That’s all a bit of the tool leading the ideas, which is generally disconcerting especially if you don’t realize or take notice of the way an algorithm is determining one’s thinking about what could be.

Don’t get me wrong — they are seductive eyeball candies. The Corning one is particularly enjoyable as pure visual experience. So is that Microsoft Office future fiction film. But these don’t feel real except for the degree of finesse in the visual effects. It almost feels like someone found the tools to do this and then the tools over-determined the diegetic prototyping. The tool was the door knob and then the designers or marketing people or whoever was behind this took the door knob and tried to build a house around it. And, in any case — they are so clean and almost fascistic in their fetish of the slick, glamorous, gleaming and super pricey stuff we’re being told we’ll live with in the near future.

What about the forgotten underbelly of the mundane futures? The ordinary and quotidian. The things that are so tangible as imminent as to be almost ignored. Like the things one would find in the Corner Convenience store but were once fantastic, extraordinary, mind-boggling disruptive stuff.

Using the Corner Convenience as our design fiction site directed us to consider things that were once amazing and are now 99¢ or $1.99 or 3 for 99¢. They’d be available *everywhere, which is as important to consider as some sort of silly ersatz coffee table that has a touch screen built into it. A thing that 1% of the world cares about, or can even comprehend or conjure some half-baked rationale to own and use before it gets tossed out when its planned obsolescence means it won’t show the antique JPEG format anymore without a firmware upgrade that probably won’t upload to it because of some byzantine tech issues that frustrates you to the point of not even caring about the thing anymore. You know? I’m still trying to get my brand new $99 5-star reviewed Brother laser printer (which replaced the 10 year HP I had that just stroked out and died) to run the crappy configuration software so I can use its built-in WiFi features. But, like..I’ll always be able to flick the flint-y scroll of a BiC lighter and make fire.

That was an aspect of the design principles that shaped these three films we made. We were deliberate in designing the production and the things in such a way that they were whiz-bang-y iPhone things with touch screens and surfaces. It was real stuff that would tip into that realm of convenience without missing a beat, and without Wieden+Kennedy running a campaign that seduces the 23-year-old bearded, skinny, waifish, Williamsburg/Brick Lane/SOMA hipsters into bending their knee — again — to the Palace of Apple.

In this Near Future Corner Convenience Store, Snow Leopard is a variety of synthetic meat jerky, not an operating system.

Anyway. Enjoy our three design fiction films.

The Players
John Sadauskas — Ersatz Shoplifter
Julie Akerly — Clerk
Dan Collins — Caffeinated Drunk/Hangover Guy
Joshua Tanenbaum — Panda Jerky Porno Trucker Guy

Background Talent
Nicole Williams
Muharrem Yildirim

Workshop Props & Make Stuff Team
Alex Gino
Joshua Tanenbaum
Adiel Fernandez
John Sadauskas
Nicole Williams
Muharrem Yildirim
Byron Lahey
John Solit

2nd Unit Production
Byron Lahey & John Solit

Thanks To Tops Liquor Staff
Greg Eccles — Owner
Matt Bannon — Manager & Nametag Maker

Special Thanks To
Assegid “Ozzie” Kidane

Directed By Julian Bleecker
Produced By Nick Foster

A *Near Future Laboratory* Production

Introducing Jayne Vidheecharoen

The Near Future Laboratory is going through a revamping and an expansion of sorts. There’ll be some changes for #2012 — new people, new projects, new initiatives, new strategies for global domination in the realm of thought-provoking unprofitable improbable unbuildable designed things.

First, we are all pleased to welcome Jayne Vidheecharoen to our little design laboratory. I had the pleasure of helping Ben Hooker teach a class Jayne was in at Art Center College of Design’s Media Design Program last Spring. Then we had Jayne as one of our summer interns at the Advanced Projects Studio at Nokia, which was tons of fun. She’s a really thoughtful playful designer now in her last moments of grad school at Art Center.

I’d like to say we sat down to chat cause we’re in the same city. But, as it turns out — we’re on opposite sides of the 5 freeway so we just did a little introduction Q&A by electronic mail.

> Q: Hello?
Hi!

> Q: Where’s home for you?
It was St. Louis. Then Seattle. Now it’s LA.

> Q: Describe your creative background? Where did you go to school? Do you consider yourself a designer? An artist? A maker-of-things?

I got my BFA in Visual Communication Design from the University of Washington, but then I also got into motion graphics after I graduated. And now I’m in the process of getting an MFA in Media Design from Art Center. So I like to consider myself a designer-illustrator-animator-maker-speculator, but maybe when I graduate I can just consolidate and call myself a Media Designer.

> Q: What’s the last book you read?
The last book I actually finished was “Hackers & Painters” by Paul Graham. But right now I’m in the middle of Jane McGonigal’s “Reality Is Broken”

> Q: What’s the last “thing” you read?

Does checking my Facebook feed count? Otherwise, probably The Fox is Black blog, although I mostly just look at the pictures 🙂

> Q: Screen or sketch book?

Definitely sketchbook for thinking. (I’ve been using these sketchbooks for about 10 years and have gone though almost 30 of them so far..)

> Q: Who’s the last creative-type you creatively or intellectually fawned after?

Jonathan Harris! This summer, I got to spend an amazing week with him at his workshop in Colorado. After that I decided he’s my official creative and philosophical guru.

> Q: If you had a favorite color that would also be an ice cream flavor if you asked for an ice cream by color..what would it be?

Mmm. Tastes like magenta.

> Q: There’s a strong undercurrent of wry humor in your work. Where does this come from? Is it a conscious creative influence or way of addressing complicated, sometimes formative terse topics? Or does it help with the nervousness many people have with the subjects that you seem to deal with — life, technology, community, interactions with things and people?

I just like to make things that make me happy, and try not to take world too seriously. I also think a lot of the things we just accept as normal in life are pretty absurd or full of alternate potential. So sometimes just tweaking something exposes our expectations and ends up being kind of funny as a side effect. Plus, I think being a little silly makes these ideas a bit more approachable.

> Q: What do you imagine yourself as when you finish school?

Hopefully after school I’ll still be making fun things. I’d love to work with at a start up for a while, and maybe start something new with some other people eventually.

> Q: Is there a person who you consider a creative influence?

Everyone I meet influences me!

> Q: Do you have an influence that isn’t a person?

The Internet. I love the internet. Probably too much.

> Q: Is there a model for doing creative work that you like to think of while you’re doing, you know…creative work? Can you describe how you go from an idea to its materialization?

Sketch some things. Pick whatever idea won’t leave me alone. Prototype it. See what I think. Be sort of underwhelmed. Find an interesting nugget to save. Put the thing aside. Talk to some people. Look at some interesting things. Repeat as necessary until I’ve collected enough interesting nuggets to make something else from those nuggets.

> Q: How does your imagination work?

Mix cartoons I grew up with, videogames I use to love, and a dash of feminism.

> Q: Are you working on a curious project now?

I’m figuring out what to do for my thesis project so I’m sort of just quickly experimenting with a lot of different things. I’m still collecting nuggets so I can’t exactly describe it. Lately, I’ve been playing around with some of the amazingly boring things we take for granted every day: like email, presentations, google street view, and shared docs. I’m trying to liberate them from their “jobs” and see what other things they could be used for and what type of values I can promote through them. I think every experience we have online (even a really banal one) has the potential to be a “magic circle” and make our lives more enjoyable.

> Q: Tell me about Souvenirs From The Internet — those fantastic commemorative plates and pillows and stuff you did? Where’d that idea come from?

To be honest, I’m pretty sure the seed was planted several years ago after watching Harry Potter. Dolores Umbridge’s office walls were covered in plates with moving cats. And I remember thinking how amazing it would be to have my favorite internet-famous lol cats on plates like that. Fast forward to this spring where I started working on a project about the current excitement about 3D printing. I’m fascinated with it but at the same time it’s like we’re just getting excited about being able to make more plastic junk faster. But the fact that these printers are connected to the internet means they could print anything, which opens up a whole realm of possibility.

At first I imagined people would use it to print spam, like a 3D fax machine. Or, since every print is machine made and the craftsman’s mark is completely removed, maybe printed objects would be dated and valued by the type of internet junk embedded in them. Maybe not junk but actual internet memories. Maybe these objects could help us remember that time we went to the internet and saw that really interesting thing. And even though we all saw the same thing at different times and from different places, it’s like we were all there together. And that seemed significant enough to put on a plate, by commemorative plate standards at least.

> Q: Tell me about this Customer Service Romance project? How’d the idea come about?
It probably stems from my own relationship with my phone. I had a “dumb” phone at the time and I didn’t particularly care about it much. I would leave it at home all the time, rarely answer it, and forget to charge it. I sort of felt a little bad, like it might have felt like I didn’t love it. At the same time I was reading about Attachment Theory and how ambivalence could result in especially needy behavior from other people. I imagined my phone would probably come off as being pretty needy if it could communicate to me. And it seemed like the only way phones are really able to communicate to us is through the phone tree. But phone trees weren’t typically used to convey emotions and personal problems. So I thought, what if it was?

> Q: When you did Customer Service Romance, did you know you were basically prototyping what will happen when Apple’s Siri begins to suffer ennui?

I like that Siri is already pretty cheeky, I’d love to see what the “I’m too good for this job” Siri is like.

> Cool. Thanks Jayne. Welcome to the Laboratory.

Continue reading Introducing Jayne Vidheecharoen

Weekending 11202011

Ack. Just a few short notes from the week previous.

Well, we got some more clarification on the graph of possible-probable-desireable but I wasn’t able to spend as much time figuring out how to employ it as an approach to design — I mean..not that I’d figure out anything crazy in the midst of a work week. But, then John Marshall sent a note that tipped me back into this idea of Device Art which has notes of things that are like “devices” perhaps in the sense of an instrument designed to achieve in the product sense, but then also art.

..device art is a form of media art that integrates art and technology as well as design, entertainment, and popular culture. Instead of regarding technology as a mere tool serving the art, as it is commonly seen, we propose a model in which technology is at the core of artworks.

So aside from this idea of the tool serving the art, but the tool itself being the art — you’re going to begin to flirt around in some curious territories in the possible-probable-desirable Venn diagram seeing as much art deliberately avoids that center sweet spot and confronts common-sense ideas as to what is, should or could be.

*shrug. It’s a start anyway. Besides, I like the idea of lots of small, little device-y things that do very unexpected, unusual but, maybe at the end of it, desirable and profitable things, but they have to be made by hand by artistans. Or things that are desirable, but not profitable but easily made. What would they be?

There was a curious visit to the Oblong Industries loft-y-studio in downtown LA late last week. You’ll know Oblong as the place where John Underkoffler evolved his diegetic prototype of gesture-based interfaces developed in Minority Report. So — that’s what they do there..and this time around rather than paying lots of attention to what the gestures were doing. I’ve decided they’re weird. It’s just one of those things where — whey you look at the world from a slightly different angle, everything looks different and then you start to wonder. It’s like closing one eye or standing on your head or putting on weirdly lensed glasses and you see something that makes you go, “huh..”

There were a bunch of things that drew my attention — first the scale of the gestures is a bit much. If you do a two-thumbs-up-and-throw-them-over-your-shoulder you perform a kind of screen-reset to put everything back to state zero. That’s useful. The gesture is a good sort of — get-outta-here sort of thing. It’s very articulated. Then there’s this one you see above — the Meatloaf-y “Stop right here!” gesture. There are others.

I’m not faulting the system. The technology works and its fun to try and its fun to watch. It makes good sense in specific contexts where you have big display systems and doing micro-gestures (relative to the scale of screens) with a mouse does not really make good sense. And I can clearly see how this bigger system them have works well in the context of certain work environments, like the guy doing operations stuff for Seal Team 6 while they’re charging into some crazy part of the world. It seems very tactical in a way.

What I was most intrigued by was the scaling-down of their systems to smaller environments and environments without those nasty gloves and big IR tracking configurations. They had a set up with what looked like an Xbox Kinect sensor for doing just broader gestures, without all the finger-twiddling of the bigger set up. This is interesting for simple navigation of things in, perhaps — a retail environment. So now we’re closer to the Minority Report thing of advertising talking to you.

Last thing was some continuingly somewhat frustrating prototyping of some audio objects. Frustrating because once you’re spoiled by the ease of working with kits like the Arduino or, for that matter — iOS — getting to know a new poorly documented chipset is like having your eyeballs dried out. But — at least the tech support guys are prompt with little hints as to what they mean when they describe something that needs a secret decoder ring to comprehend.

Continue reading Weekending 11202011

Weekending 10302011

Oh, okay. Last week I was in London.

There was some fun, cool Nokia stuff going on — besides Nokia World, which I didn’t attend only because there were also other things going on, including this event at the Design Museum called People Made in which a well-curated exhibition of Nokia’s contribution to the world of mobile social networked stuff. Despite assy and snarky remarks on the influence Nokia has had on the design of these sorts of things, I thought this was quite good, quite legible and just small enough to be digestible and large enough to note the important bits, like the evolution of mobile picture taking, degrees of portability and things to come in the near future.

There was a swell two day workshop for Project Audio with the fine folks at the Really Interesting Group. That included some days inside at Whitechapel Gallery and a field trip to the Science Museum, which has a great exhibit of audio things from the early 20th century into the networked age. Old radio sets and things with knobs are great for thinking about what the future holds for sound design and audio devices and talking to people. And, it was fun to see Listening Post there — I didn’t know that the science museum had bought one. That’d make the third exhibition space in which I’ve seen it — first at The Whitney when it premiered, I believe way back in the day. Then at the San Jose Museum during ISEA in 2009 I think it was. It holds up remarkably well. It’s quite prescient, too — in particular as regards this idea of “trending topics” in some sense. I’m not sure precisely what algorithm Mark Hansen is using to extract content (obviously chats and discussions in text) — but one gets the sense that the statistics is identifying things of import or interest. Now — it might not be what *most people are talking about, but they seem to become poignant statements indicating states of mind. There is also quite excellent use of silence in such a way that one is not thinking — huh..is this thing broken? Some ambience and machine noises give the device its mechanistic quality that is nice and sculptural and real and that of a thing with momentum. Which is very much unlike most digital/computational devices. I really like the machinic character of this thing, Listening Post.

I had a visit with James Auguer over at Design Interactions at the RCA. Nick Foster was there as well. That was fun. I’d never been. It felt like an art college. I gave a little impromptu talk to a clutch of students. And Noam Toran was there and gave me some lovely documentation of his projects. I especially like the series of objects he made called The Macguffin Library. It beautifully captures the way Hitchckock’s use of these opaque plot devices are objects to move a story — which is a concept that can be directly applied to the Design Fiction notion. These are things that are props that stand in for whatever it is that motivates and moves a story along. They’re nice as a concept because the thing itself matters even less than its functionality — except insofar as its functionality is to motivate a story.

There was a nice afternoon spent with the partner-in-crime Nicolas Nova discussing the future of the Near Future Laboratory and some exciting evolutions of our activities that will happen quite soon. Expect more to be going on here and some new folks coming along to make more things and create more weird implications and provocations. All discussed over toast, beans, sausages and eggs.

I was super excited that Geoff Manaugh rang to see if I’d be around to participate in this event at the Architectural Association called Thrilling Wonder Stories. I don’t know how to describe it except to say it was a full day of a seminar of presentations and discussions on a variety of Thrilling Wonder Story-like topics. I shared some thoughts and perspectives on designing with science fiction at the end, together with Bruce Sterling and Kevin Slavin. That was swell — fun and a great way to end the week in London.

That was pretty much it, except for one little thing that Bruce left me thinking about after that four hour dinner the last night. Venn diagrams. Evidently done by this fellow called Hugh Dubberly and the diagram contains the three circules and one is “DESIRABLE” the other is “BUILDABLE” and the other is “PROFITABLE”. The overlap in the center is what markets and capital understand as “real” stuff. You get these annoying debates within making-industries where that is the “real” deal. It was the introduction to my brief 15 minute talk at Thrilling Wonder Stories — people get shy and apologetic when they discuss things outside of that center “sweet spot” of things that are all-of desirable, buildable and profitable. “Oh, sorry — this is just an idea” or — “Oh, this is only a demo” or — “Oh, this is just a concept/video/bit-of-fiction”

Needless to say — we here in the Shameless Speculation Department of the Near Future Laboratory think that position is rubbish. There should be no apologizing for the imagination. Everything counts. I’d say even that the things outside of the sweet-spot even more than those in it. That sweet-spot is modifiable. Just cause something can be built does not make it “more” than the thing that can be massively manufactured because it fits in someone’s measure of what that sweet-spot consists of — what its parameters of “sweet-spotiness” are. And then this introduces a discussion about those parameters and scale and what profitability consists of.

That’s it.

Continue reading Weekending 10302011

Weekending 10232011

Okay. Maybe we will get back into the swing of the weekending note. This one won’t be comprehensive, but a note nonetheless to note a few things.

First, something I found while flipping through the Internet that got me thinking about using creative tension and inversion in the design fiction process and also connected to this Anthem Group, which has curious dispatches related to object-oriented ontology (which I barely understand) and Bruno Latour: this was an interesting post on the reason for having “intellectual fiends”. It helps me understand why, when I was studying Science and Technology Studies and just, you know…academic-y “theory” broadly, there was always this impulse to set ideas or discussions in opposition. To find ways to be critical of anything. Which gets annoying and I’m sure is the reason for general pissy-ness in the academic world.

It turns out it has its usefulness, if you stay optimistic and hopeful. It can be a way to move discussions always in some direction rather than allowing them to sit still and suffer the tyranny of undisputed acceptance. Of course, these things would always get quite squirrely — debates and the perpetual state of “crisis” over some theoretical position. That all becomes quite tiresome and you wind up with folks who are never, ever satisfied and always finding an argument to be had.

But, related to present work, it provides a logic for designing by inversion — taking the initial instinct or common assumption and then turning it on its head. I guess things like making physical, “embedded”, full-electronic prototypes rather than “apps” is one way of seeing this. Or doing the creative-opposite of something to really get into the *why of the natural, assumed, expected thing.

For example, when we made the social/trust alarm clock it was a way to invert commonly held assumptions about about the rituals of waking up in the morning. They don’t get inverted because we think the world should be hung upside down by its shoes — at least not routinely. But one can put “the normal” in relief by looking at things from the downside looking back up. Looking sideways. And it’s not until you actually *look at things through an unusual lens and make the assumption that the abnormal is actually “normal” — then you start seeing new curious opportunities and stories to explore that can then evolve and cause creative — rather than typical — disruptions that hopefully make the normal more engaging, fun, creative and curious.

Continue reading Weekending 10232011

Why Good Design Isn't Eye Candy

An acquaintance of The Laboratory I met while in London that last time is a design consultant guy who told me this story about Eye Candy. Him and his studio/team were offered a commission of work. It was design work, or at least that was the premise of the offering. A high-profile team of well-meaning technologists of various stripes — engineers, engineer marketers, chest-thumping Valley types — were in the midst of preparing a presentation of some work to finance guys. The finance guys were, like.. money men who make decisions and were hopefully going to throw money at their project idea before they hopped off on their flying jet aeroplanes that I guess one of the hubris-y entrepreneur Valley guys actually flew, or used to fly as a fighter jock or something. ((You get the personality profile here.))

The engineer-y team had some ideas that basically took a very hot trend and doubled and tripled it — the up-and-to-the-right extrapolation of today and made it *more..which I understood to mean not necessarily better…just more of the thing that exists today. Maybe two or three buttons instead of one; or 7 inches instead of 3.5 inches and we’ll blow the competition out of the water. Something. It might’ve been something like making quad axle wheels for luggage, or a tablet with a car battery so it lasts a full *week without a recharge or something. I have no idea, but this is the image that comes to mine for the story I heard. Well-meaning, but not well-thought-through stuff.

Anyway, the guy who the engineers approached is a guy with a depth and breadth of design experience. He’s a creative guy, and his studio has a really good sense of strategy and ways of communicating..and he can make stuff for real, like — model making; deep CAD expertise, mechanical and electronic prototypes. Really incredibly thoughtful, experienced guy and as I understand it, a designer with integrity who would turn something down based on his instinct about whether or to what degree the work will build his credibility as a designer and that credibility is directly tied to how much the work will make things better. He’d be the last to do something that’d just be landfill fodder, or work that is, like — just poorly thought-through, or lacking in depth and consideration.

And then here come these entrepreneur-engineer guys who I was told asked integrity-designer guy to help them with their presentation by giving them some “eye candy” to put in the PowerPoint. This went on for half a day. The engineer-y team shared their idea and then explained that they had this pressing meeting coming up and — would his studio be able to just pull something out of their inventory of cool physical models and CAD renderings to put into the presentation deck? What they needed, they said — was Eye Candy. Some seductive treats on their dessert cart of a good idea that would have the finance-y jet pack guys licking their chops, slobbering capital all over the models.

Even in retelling this story, my brow perspires from frustration because – I know the tendency to consider the work of design as either providing cool looking stuff absent the integrity of its intent; or thinking of design as styling to the point of absurdity.

But — what’s the big deal? Why *not make some eye candy? I mean, if it satisfies the eyes and makes people ooh-and-aah, isn’t that a good thing? People don’t ooh-and-ahh about something they don’t like, and making people ooh-and-ahh is a goal in some entertainment circles, so — what gives? Why does this story make my head want to explode all over the place?

Well, firstly — it’s a bad precedent for design, generally speaking, if I can speak for “design” for a moment. It’s design without integrity, in the service of surface glitz and glam. It’s design that only exists on the surface, like styling that says not too much about the intent. It lacks thinking beyond the “what looks good” sort of thinking. It’s *thin — you can’t dig into the thing itself because there is nothing behind it except a desire to wow someone. There’s no logic or reasoning behind it, except to wow someone. It’s pure Id, pure instinct — not that instinct is something that should not inspire design, but by itself it’s selfish in a way. It accounts for nothing but what something looks like, rather than the larger context of where, when, why, for what.

In a word, just doing something to pad a page in a presentation or to put on a table is dishonest. Pulling something from another project out of a drawer that *looks like it could be the thing these guys were trying to sell, is dishonest. There’s no integrity — you can’t tell the story of this thing and why it has come to be or what principle informs the action or contours or IxD of the thing. You have to lie, basically. Or not say anything about it at all which makes one wonder — why put it there to begin with.

No, right? That’s just a bad way of going about things. It’s not quite as bad as industrial designers making toothbrushes that look like they should be moving fast because they *really wish they were designing cars, but it’s pretty bad to do eye candy designs on their own when such eye candy would be disconnected from the initial vision. Or even question that initial vision by running a more proper, considered design process that *might lead to something with integrity, and with the satisfaction of being complete and thorough. Something that would be the result of a superlative, principle-led design practice. And that takes time — or at least more time than digging around for something that looks like it could belong to the idea these guys had.

Bleech.

Why do I blog this? It’s a good story, with a good lesson in it. Integrity is crucial for design to continue doing what it’s able to do. Eye candy is dishonest and lacks the integrity that connects it to good, thoughtful work. And it means the work is crap, poorly considered and fails to make things better. It’s the equivalent of doing design “’cause” — or worse.
Continue reading Why Good Design Isn't Eye Candy

Design Advances

General Designs Delivery. Remnant of some sort found on the wall beyond the model shop.

I’m going to paraphrase something I read in a recent issue of The New Yorker that immediately made me think of things we bunch of folk in the studio are thinking long and hard about — doing advanced design, but even before the “doing”, understanding what it is to be an advanced design studio and what the heck is “advanced design.”

The article was about Quantum Physics called Dream Machine by Rivka Galchen on David Deutsch and efforts to create a Quantum Computer. It’s a fascinating article and I recommend it. Good science fact-fiction stuff. These guys in laboratories with elaborate support apparati to make a four bit computer. Awesome. I can easily imagine the wisps of dry ice-like condensation puffing out of copper-clad plumbing and fittings.

Okay, back to the article. Now — this is just a word substitution not meant to equate what brainiac quantum physicists do with what a bunch of (pepper this with humility) clever creatives do in a little design studio. Just word substitution. In the article, as Galchen is trying to frame the sensibilities of Quantum Physicists and describes it thus:

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true..

That simple statement stopped me in my reading tracks. There was something deceptively simple in that — an expectation that, or almost rule in a way that in order to move the field along, in order to advance physics, or do advanced physics, or to determine whether or not one was advancing physics — well, one had to be prepared or make sure that you were accepting absurdities.

The word substitution will be obvious to you by now: doing advanced design requires a bit of accepting things that, on the face of it, are absurd — at least at first.

Accepting absurdities, or designing things that are absurd, or realizing that what you’re doing seems a bit absurd are various measures of advancing the state of a practice idiom, like design.

Design advances ..by accepting absurdities

There’s a bit of facing adversity built into that sort of discipline. It means that people are going to look at what you do as absurd — as disconnected from the state of the world right now; as idle experimentation; as just a bunch of weird stuff.

I think the challenge is around the degree of “advance.” Sometimes rather than making “big disruption” sorts of advances, small, simple, low-hanging-fruit sorts of things are more tractable and, potentially — more disruptive for their simplicity. This is where the phrase “wheels on luggage” comes from. Just doing something that, in hindsight seems so obvious, yet is exceptionally, blindly simple to accomplish (again, in hindsight.) Often these “little things done much better” sorts of disruptions effect human behavior in an unexpectedly profound way. Sadly, the hubris of the main players in constructing the future — engineers and technologists — consider a disruption to be wholesale system change of some sort rather than making little things better than they already are. It’s also a battle between complex programs or teams, versus relatively simple ideas with small teams executing a clearly stated vision.

Why do I blog this? There was something about that quote that has stuck with me. I’m not sure I’ve teased it all out — but its resonant and I need to figure out how best to describe what it is that “advanced design” is so I know it when I see it; and what activities “advancing design” consists of so I can tell myself what to do. Accepting absurdities and finding the way to get others who perhaps are less inclined to is a small, fitful start towards this goal.

Continue reading Design Advances

Opportunism

Completely understandable how the recent tragic events in Japan would translate into email from an electronics source containing *only parts and supplies and modules to make Geiger Counters. At the same time as it’s understandable, it’s one of those things that feels like it’s taking advantage of the general panic, confusion, sadness and apocalyptic angst.

Not deflecting the urgency and anxiety of recent events in Japan, it’s curious to me to think about how and when change is able to happen. By that I mean that things happen, swerve off-course or are able to swerve off of into unexpected, new directions. For example, the events after 9/11 where an *opportunity space opened up in which dramatic, unprecedented changes were able to be made in the legal systems of some countries. Things that would not have been so easy to implement had their been no epic tragedy. Similarly, in a way — now we learn quite a bit about nuclear physics, science, speculation about the malfeasance (if you can call it that) of this nuclear quasi-agency in Japan (via @xenijardin WSJ: TEPCO initially resisted using seawater to cool reactors; harm to “valuable power assets” feared ). We find ourselves preparing — again — for an earthquake, nuclear catastrophe, flood, Tsunami, etc. Entirely enormous nations are scaling back and turning off nuclear power plants (I find this most intriguing) and rethinking their energy policies. I mean — that’s epic. Whatever side you may be on the issue of nuclear power, these events, at the cost of untold lives, future lives, physical infrastructure, and so on — everything has been changed.

The imagined course into which the future was going to be made, has swerved.

We often like to think of change coming about from good, thoughtful, happy actions and activities. Like good design work, for example. I think, from my experience, it is often never like this. It is hard. Change is hard. Making things better is hard. Generally, and anecdotally from the experience of myself and others up and down the hall here on the 7th floor of the Laboratory — people are reluctant to change their ways, the course of their lives. Moving out of “comfort zones” and all that is, well — uncomfortable. Adapting and adopting new ways of living, behaving, thinking would make for a more resilient world, I think. One that was not afraid of difference, of giving things up for the hope and possibility of a better things.

Of course — it can all go wrong. But at least we’d try.

*Anyway..

Parenthetically, Studio 360 has an intriguing related radio story on this topic. It is called Japan: The Imagination of Disaster.

Why do I blog this? As always, we here are quite intrigued by how the future comes to be — what are the mechanics, semantics and motivations that move people to obtain and create possible futures. In this case, “taking advangage” of opportunites when one can do that bit of swerving, rudder-pushing, tiller cranking because the currents become favorable to try a new tack.
At that moment when the normal course of events seems to swirl out of control

Continue reading Opportunism

A Wry Look At Wheels On Luggage

Why do I blog this? The idiom “wheels on luggage” has been one we’ve been exploring here, not so much to get the precise history of it (although that is interesting), but because of what it stands for. Change from one set of circumstances to another from which you look back and wonder — how could things have ever been otherwise? Or, because the change is not due to technological innovation (which is what so much is assumed to pivot) but from an innovation that is simple, direct and requires no billion dollar budgets, scores of PowerPoints, workshops galore and team off-sites. I love this kind of change — much more than the technical variety because they remind me that big change can come from small, simple alterations that just make things better. Some people like big technical imbroglios. While I don’t not like technical things — the power of one person to just sort of *shrug* and screw a couple of wheels onto the bottom of something is quite provocative. Small things done exceptionally well. ((A line of scholarly inquiry as to the social, cultural, political and technological concerns that broadly fit within the study of Science Technology and Society, or Science and Technology Studies. Fair Use, I’d say.))
Continue reading A Wry Look At Wheels On Luggage

The Paradox of Intellectual Property

Mine, not yours, buster.

This might be an old one, but I just recently heard about it while catching up on my favorite economy and finance Podcast — the brilliantly home-spun Planet Money. In it they are talking about their project to tell the story of how a t-shirt is being made..by making a t-shirt, from buying the bales of cotton to getting it yarned and spun and made into fabric and cut and printed and sold. You can hear all about it in this short podcast which explains how they got this idea from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli.

This is an intriguing story by itself, but I was particularly impressed with the mention and short discussion of a paper called The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design by Kal Raustiala and Christopher Jon Sprigman. Here is the abstract of the paper:

The orthodox justification for intellectual property is utilitarian. Advocates for strong IP rights argue that absent such rights copyists will free-ride on the efforts of creators and stifle innovation. This orthodox justification is logically straightforward and well reflected in the law. Yet a significant empirical anomaly exists: the global fashion industry, which produces a huge variety of creative goods without strong IP protection. Copying is rampant as the orthodox account would predict. Yet innovation and investment remain vibrant. Few commentators have considered the status of fashion design in IP law. Those who have almost uniformly criticize the current legal regime for failing to protect apparel designs. But the fashion industry itself is surprisingly quiescent about copying. Firms take steps to protect the value of trademarks, but appear to accept appropriation of designs as a fact of life. This diffidence about copying stands in striking contrast to the heated condemnation of piracy and associated legislative and litigation campaigns in other creative industries.

Why, when other major content industries have obtained increasingly powerful IP protections for their products, does fashion design remain mostly unprotected – and economically successful? The fashion industry is a puzzle for the orthodox justification for IP rights. This paper explores this puzzle. We argue that the fashion industry counter-intuitively operates within a low-IP equilibrium in which copying does not deter innovation and may actually promote it. We call this the piracy paradox. This paper offers a model explaining how the fashion industry’s piracy paradox works, and how copying functions as an important element of and perhaps even a necessary predicate to the industry’s swift cycle of innovation. In so doing, we aim to shed light on the creative dynamics of the apparel industry. But we also hope to spark further exploration of a fundamental question of IP policy: to what degree are IP rights necessary to induce innovation? Are stable low-IP equilibria imaginable in other industries as well? Part I describes the fashion industry and its dynamics and illustrates the prevalence of copying in the industry. Part II advances an explanation for the piracy paradox that rests on two features: induced obsolescence and anchoring. Both phenomena reflect the status-conferring power of fashion, and both suggest that copying, rather than impeding innovation and investment, promotes them. Part II also considers, and rejects, alternative explanations of the endurance of the low-IP status quo. Part III considers extensions of our arguments to other fields. By examining copyright’s negative space – those creative endeavors that copyright does not address – we argue can we can better understand the relationship between copyright and innovation.

Why do I blog this? I think this gets to the substance of many issues related to intellectual property rights and the arguments on both sides. It’s also suspicious the ways that the anomolies to the “orthodox” and rather instrumental consideration of new ideas are largely ignored, according to the authors. Of course there are going to be outlier complexities to the perceived canonical position that ideas can become property that can be protected in these ways — but the fact that they are not looked at closely as revealing new approaches is very suspicious to me. I don’t believe IP is a solid, like nature — it mutates as a concept. Gobbling it all up and protecting it — or measuring people’s performance based on their ability to create and protect IP — that’s just frustrating nonsense. People often put IP on their CVs as if it were war trophies or something like this. In many ways it reveals a lack of foresight and aspiration for their ideas to say they are protected and proprietary. G’ahhh.. It drives me nuts sometimes.

Oh, on a more happy note at the end of this podcast you’ll hear that our friends at Tinker Studios in London are going to have their t-shirt idea implemented in this Planet Money t-shirt — a QR Code on the t-shirt that links to, presumably, the story about how the t-shirt was made, which is the story that Planet Money is working on.

Here’s a link to the Planet Money Podcast.

Continue reading The Paradox of Intellectual Property