“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born”
— Nikola Tesla

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer–say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep–it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly”
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“On the other hand, although I have a regular work schedule, I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination”
— Albert Einstein

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet”
— Franz Kafka

“One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible”
— Pablo Picasso

I found these excellent articles by Leo Babauta a few days ago: The No.1 Habit of Highly Creative People and The lost art of solitude. They are an excellent dive into the value of solitude and they provide also some excellent quotes, like the ones above.

The location was amazing, the organization was also up to the game and overall I’m satisfied of the event. There was a good variety of talks, and even if there were a couple of them that I noticed were difficult for the crowd, being a bit too high or abstract, overall these played well in the balance with the more pragmatical ones.

Unfortunately I have also a criticism: while the event was indeed good, in the end basically nobody talked really about emergence with the exception of Jamie Brassett. Most of the talks were either referencing to it in an incredible loose way or using the term with a completely different meaning — giving me the uncomfortable impression that some of the speakers weren’t even knowledgeable about emergence at all.

I’m not really good in doing reports afterward, but as I did during dConstruct 2011, I sketched a PDF book during the event with all my notes. You can download it here (I hope it’s readable).

A few interesting concepts or quotes:

• Michael Wolff: “People tolerate pretty terrible behaviours” and on the other side “People will never forget how you made them feel”.
• Jamie Brassett: “The challenge is to articulate an open space with simple rules, like a flock”.
• Richard Seymour (video): “Why did you write something in the back of the clock where nobody sees it? — God can see it”.
• Anais Nin (cited): “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are”.
• Tom Hulme: “Our ability to plan is disappearing”.
• Misha Glenny (video): “Certain disabilities turn in incredible skills with a computer”.
• Julie Jenson Bennett: “We should stop looking for the new but look for the better”.
• Nadia Berthouze: “Our body speaks to others as it speaks to ourselves”.
• Barry Buzan: “Individuals today can achieve relatively big power”.

You can see all the videos on the event website.

Norman was bothered by his analysis and tried to find examples that refuted this conclusion: he failed. Every radical innovation he investigated was done without design research, without careful analysis of a person’s or even a society’s needs.
— Norman D., Verganti R. (2012) Incremental and Radical innovation

The metaphor used in the paper is a common and very effective one: incremental innovation is like being on a mountain and trying to reach the top of it. Radical innovation instead is like jumping to a new mountain with the hope that it’s higher than the one you are on.

Understanding this is very important because it shows you the advantages and risks of both approaches. The incremental approach is very effective when grounded in research and is the one leading to the top, step by step. On the other side the radical approach isn’t usually grounded in research and has a quite high failure ratio because you can’t predict on which mountain you are going to land.

However, you can clearly see that:

Radical innovations seldom live up to their potential when first introduced. At first, they are often difficult to use, expensive, and limited in capability. Incremental innovation is necessary to transform the radical idea into a form that is acceptable to those beyond early adopters.
The bottom line is that both forms of innovation are necessary.

I think that you can see this clearly with startups. A startup by itself is usually an attempt in doing radical innovation, but in the principle it’s very very rough and requires lots of work to start growing and showing the full potential. Plus, if the idea isn’t delivering – the mountain isn’t as high as imagined – the startup usually pivots.

The paper goes on showing the two main dimensions where innovation can happen.

We conclude that human-centered design, with its emphasis on iterated observation, ideation, and testing is ideally suited for incremental innovation and unlikely to lead to radical innovation. Radical innovation comes from changes in either technology or meaning. Technology-driven innovation often comes from inventors and tinkerers. Meaning-driven innovation, however, has the potential to be driven through design research, but only if the research addresses  fundamental questions of new meanings and their interpretation.

And this is the most interesting part: technology and meaning, as two dimensions where innovation can happen. The two are related, and as such there’s always a bit of each in every innovation. The accent is where the main shift happens.

Let’s see briefly a few examples from the paper:

1. Market-Pull Innovation: any user centered design approach.
2. Technology-Push Innovation: the introduction of the color TV, the Xerox copier, the electronic calculator.
3. Meaning-Driven Innovation: the shift of watches from tools to fashion accessories, the invention of the mini-skirt in 1960s as a symbol of women’s freedom.
4. Technology Epiphanies: the Wii, using a new technology to change the space of video games.

Clearly, the Market-Pull Innovation is safer, while the Technology Epiphanies are way more difficult, also due to the resistance of the users to change.

You can find the full paper in PDF on this page. It’s worth a read. Norman and Verganti do a great work in detailing these two dimensions with some excellent examples and models.

“To some extent the social factors of status do affect how we perceive and value art, but what I want to try to convince you in this presentation is that there’s something else going on. Something that psychologists have called essentialism. And the idea of essentialism is that we don’t just focus on the superficial aspects of things, rather, we go deep. We are obsessed with origin and history. This is natural. Universal. Hard-wired and irresistible.”
— Paul Bloom

He does a lot of examples, spacing from art to sex and food as well, showing through these examples and researches how essentialism isn’t just a social and cultural construct, but exists in young children as well. Hard-wired indeed.

One of the examples he gives is an opera by Tom Friedman. The opera is a white piece of paper.  It’s a completely blank canvas. The title is “A thousand hours of staring”, and the reason of it is that the artist stared at that blank sheet of paper for 1.000 hours.

I think that essentialism points out a very interesting aspect that can give us a good way to interpret art and to juxtapose it to design. It will not answer every possible question, it won’t close any debate, but I still found it very interesting.

Follow me for a moment.

Essentialism might be the reason why design is different from art, even when the two result in exactly the same thing from a pure perception standpoint. Now of course it’s very difficult to have a work of art and a work of design producing exactly the same visual result, the same architecture, the same music or performance, or else, but it’s not hard to imagine if you take the example of Tom Friedman above, or if you remind the saying “Oh, I could have done that”.

The difference lies in what’s behind that. While both design and art can create beautiful results, it’s the essence of it, it’s the story behind that distinguish the two. In simplistic terms it’s also the amount of time that the opera symbolizes. It’s the meaning of it that’s important. It’s the human nature that it connects with, the one of the author(s) connecting in some way with yours.

That’s why two drawings that look exactly the same will be different when someone tells you that one is by Picasso and the other by their friend. It’s because we attach meaning to these art creation that transcend the appearance itself. I probably shouldn’t use this term, but in some way it is its “soul”.

That’s why if I take anything from the road and I place it inside an empty room in a museum, everybody will start thinking “what is the author trying to tell me?”. It’s automatic, because we expect that from art. And I’m not fantasizing: Marcel Duchamp did exactly this with his “Fountain“, and it’s also probably one of the provocations behind Piero Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit“.

Essentialism doesn’t apply to art only, but from its perspective anything can be art as long as there’s a story attached to it with probably someone that injected a lot of thinking and made you think about your human nature.

So, what about design?

If we exclude the accepted fine arts and artistic disciplines like painting, writing, sculpting and so on, design is probably the non-artistic discipline more likely to be debated as art. The reason is simple: they are both creative processes and they both use the same media.

Using the essentialist perspective however you can see the difference between the two: art is defined by the author itself as a deep and meaningful process that, in the end, created the object or performance. Design instead doesn’t have this kind of story attached to the result itself. The essence of the two is deeply different, and as such, one is art and the other isn’t.

If you observe some edge cases you can see this. Take Philippe Starck lemon squeezer, the “Juicy Salif”. It’s a squeezer that doesn’t work. But Starck is a famous designer, he created it with a specific intent, it has a story attached, and it was built by a famous italian design brand, Alessi. Even the wikipedia entry of it tells the bit of story attached to it and quotes Starck saying “it’s not meant to squeeze lemons but to start conversations”. If you buy the Juicy Salif, it’s not to squeeze lemons. It’s for the story.
And it’s exposed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

I was discussing this perspective with photographer Claire Gaul and it came out that you can summarize and simplify it as: an object of design has its roots in what is going to do after it’s created, while an object of art has its roots in what happened before it was created. I must clarify immediately – thanks Riccardo - that this doesn’t imply that art “dies” once it’s done: both of them are going to be experienced in the future, you experience art after it’s done, it could make you cry and so on. But you can imagine like the weight exists in two different parts of the timeline.

The two things can be mixed, as in Starck’s example above.
The two things are also interwoven with a whole lot of other factors often debated when you try to define art.

In the end, essentialism alone isn’t able to define clearly the boundary of art and design, but I think that its perspective has a great value within this discussion. That’s why I encourage you to watch Paul Bloom’s “How Pleasure Work” and think about it.

• 1930s — Walter Shewhart proposes a series of short “plan-do-study-act” (PDSA) cycles.
• 1950s — The X-15 hypersonic jet applied incremental and iterative development.
• 1958 — Project Mercury (NASA) software development, ran with half-day iterations.

“All of us, as far as I can remember, thought waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid, or at least ignorant of the realities.”
— Weinberg G. M. (Project Mercury)

• 1972 — The USS “Trident” Ohio submarine command and control system, developed by IBM FSD. More than 1 million lines of code. Four 6 month iterations.
• 1972 — Army Site Defence missile tracking software. $100 million project, developed by TRW in 5 iterations.
• 1970s — Light Airborne Multipurpose System (US Navy). 45 one-month iterations.

“Every one of those deliveries was on time and under budget”
— Mills H.

“Software development should be done incrementally, in stages with continuous user participation and replanning and with design-to-cost programming within each stage.”
— Mills H. (1976)

• 1977-1980 — Space Shuttle (NASA) avionic software. 17 iterations over 31 months (8 weeks average).
• 1980s — Artificial intelligence researchers used Lisp machines and evolutionary prototyping.
• 1987 — Command and Control Processing and Display System Replacement, developed by TRW in 6 time-boxed iterations.
• 1980s — The DoD was experiencing a project failure rate of 75% in a sample of waterfall project of about $37 billion overall, where only 2% of them were used without extensive modification. At the end of 1987 the DoD changed its policies to allow iterative development.
• 1994 — The DoD was still victim of the waterfall mindset, developing too much using waterfall and so Paul Kaminsky issued a report stating: “DoD must manage programs using iterative development”.

But of course, by the 90s the agile concepts were spreading more and as such more and more project were started using this approach, until in 2001 the agile manifesto was written.

Here I did just a summary, but the data I presented comes from a 2003 article by Larman and Basili, published by IEEE: “Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History” (PDF). It’s well written and with loads of references and details. Thanks to Dave Gray for pointing me to this great source.

What’s incredibly interesting is that the author of what’s considered the first formalization of waterfall, Winston Royce, agrees instead with incremental and iterative development. Even in its very first article in 1970, “Managing the Development of Large Software Systems” (PDF), he states:

STEP 3: DO IT TWICE
If the computer program in question is being developed for the first time, arrange matters so that the version finally delivered to the customer for operational deployment is actually the second version insofar as critical design/operations areas are concerned.

Waterfall… has never been really waterfall.

Why then? Well, if you think about it, it’s all about human perception and learning. The waterfall article dedicated entire pages to this “STEP 3: DO IT TWICE” but unfortunately it wasn’t part of the core message in the “waterfall” idea, and as such dropped out in the popular understanding of it.

It’s a matter of perception, learning and communication.

That’s also why I started talking about the Dot Loop: to have a simple and effective way to communicate the approach I value most and show how it applies universally.

A good leader has these four factors (Hogan, Kaiser, 2005):

1. Decisiveness: in case of uncertainity, they make decisions and take responsibility.
2. Competence: they are skilled and can create good teams.
3. Integrity: they are able to create deep trustworthy relationships.
4. Vision: they are able to see both short term and long term, seduce and inspire.

But to reach the next level and be a great leader, there are two more (Collins, 2001):

1. Modesty: it’s very interesting to see that modesty is a quality for great leaders, something that goes agains the common perception of being show-offs.
2. Persistency: they constantly push their goals, vision and push the team forward.

Jeremy wrote also another post, about the seven reasons why leaders fail. These are:

1. Strict hierarchies
2. Poor decision-making
3. Huge pay differentials
4. Impossible standards for leaders
5. Climb the greasy pole
6. Psychology of followership

These may all sound like pretty straightforward characteristics, but apparently few have what it takes. Many surveys have been carried out asking people what they think of their immediate bosses. On average these find that about half are seen as incompetent.
— Dean J. (2012) How to be a great leader

I did a quick summary here, but the two posts from Jeremy digs into much more detail: How to be a great leader and Seven reasons leaders fail.

Despise and deride it all you like, but the business card remains a growth market. How has this 17th century technology not just survived but continued to flourish? [...]
Bump was fast out of the gate, reporting 53 million users since its March 2009 launch, but a recent internal evaluation surprised its founders. The deep dive revealed that despite its design as a business product, it was primarily serving an after-hours function as a social tool.
— Bennett R. (2012) How Business Cards Survive in the Age of LinkedIn

“Surprised”? To find the survival of the business card surprising means not understanding human behaviour and interaction design as well.

Giving a card has many meanings: from the physicality of the card itself (have you ever played with one in your hand?) to the ritual of the handover (a strong social ritual), to the speed of doing that (handover, done!), to the visual design of the card itself (that’s a cool design!), to the collection part of it (did you ever flip through the cards you got after a day?).

If you want to “challenge” business cards with your product:

1. it needs to be faster, or as fast as.
   Test it. If I can give a business card and take your faster than your app, I already win.
2. it needs to be visually designed, branded, colorful, not just a line of data.
   You need to allow people to design their cards. There’s pride and “wow” in that.
3. it needs to create a sort of ritual.
   This is more subtle, but you need to avoid technicalities. Create some kind of gesture maybe. An interaction. Bump does this pretty well, but maybe something less awkward would be nice.

Notice that “having to install the app” already hits 1 pretty badly. Yes, it’s fun at the beginning to try the new app and see how it works, but when the novelty goes away, you’re going back to cards again.

Technology alone can’t help here. Promising that aggregating the cards afterward in a better way, organize the data, setup the reminders and the call isn’t enough to balance out the three factors above. Promising a better long-term outcome over a higher initial investment is something difficult as human beings, otherwise gyms would be the best business ever. ;)

Nothing surprising.

And yes, it’s again about Proximity Interactions.

Q: What makes design different at Apple?
A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple  but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

[...] When you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea and everything changes — the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.
— Ive J. (2012) Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh by Marc Prigg

Design is inherently connected with prototype and make.

There isn’t much to add.

I used to speak in a regular voice. I was able to assert, demand, question. Then I started teaching. At a university? And my students had this rising intonation thing? It was particularly noticeable on telephone messages. “Hello? Professor Gorman? This is Albert? From feature writing?” [...]

The sorority members’ own interpretation of uptalk was that it was a way of being inclusive. McLemore’s conclusions are somewhat similar. She says the rises are used to connect phrases, and to connect the speaker to the listener, as a means of “getting the other person involved.” [...]

Once commercial airline pilots start using uptalk, McLemore notes, it will mean that a full-blown dialect shift has occurred. Uptalk won’t be uptalk anymore. It will be, like, American English?
— James Gorman (1993) Like, Uptalk?

Here’s a video example of uptalk.

There are a lot of interesting details here. The first is that while it’s a simple and easy to spot inflection and as such it’s easy to notice its spread over different areas and countries, it’s still hard to track. It seems that it originated as a way of talking of the adolescent girls in California, and it inherited the name “Valley Girl” from a Frank Zappa song that highlights that intonation.

It’s even more interesting because while it’s commonly perceived as a adolescent, immature or low-class inflexion, some researches noticed some different scenarios:

McLemore studied intonation in one very particular context. She observed uses of intonation in a Texas sorority, where uptalk was not at all about uncertainty or deference. It was used most commonly by the leaders, the senior officers. Uptalk was a kind of accent, or tag, to highlight new information for listeners: “We’re having a bake sale? On the west mall? On Sunday?” When saying something like “Everyone should know that your dues should be in,” they used a falling intonation at the end of the sentence.
— Gorman James (1993) Like, Uptalk?

New studies show that people who use uptalk are not insecure wallflowers but powerful speakers who like getting their own way: teachers, talk-show hosts, politicians and facetious shop assistants.

Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been monitoring George W. Bush’s speeches on his fascinating weblog Language Log, points out that the President has started peppering his Iraq speeches with HRTs. Why? Not, apparently, because Bush’s confidence is failing him. Rather, it has more to do with an aggressive need to direct conversation.
— Marsh Stefanie (2006) The rise of the interrogatory statement

That’s even more interesting, because if it’s validated as it seems happening, it might point out that adolescent girls are in fact the ones that are more able to evolve the language as a whole.

But linguists now say [...] Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.
“A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute,” said Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. “But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.” [...]
Carmen Fought a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. ”The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
— Quenqua Douglas (2012) They’re, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve

This overall is an excellent example of spoken language evolution: its birth, usage, diffusion and perception. And also how we try to understand it and, sometimes, can’t just avoid it.

Responsive Web Design

• If you want layout adjustments across devices.
• You can live without complete optimization for specific devices.
• You don’t have access to server-side solutions.
• You really don’t trust device detection.

Device Experience

• You want maximum optimization for each type of device.
• And the ability to serve completely different user experience & features to each class of device.
• You’re comfortable with device detection.

— LukeW (2012) Which One: Responsive Design, Device Experiences, or RESS?

LukeW takes a completely technical perspective: devices, optimization, server-side, detection. It’s true, it’s important, but in the end, is it really what’s that choice should be about?

What was not implicitly said in Luke’s article (and I think bears discussion) is that choosing responsiveness, as a characteristic shouldn’t necessarily define the wider implementation approach. Device Experiences (i.e. standalone sites, aimed at a group of devices) can also be responsive, providing the flexibility to support a much wider range of devices.
— Stephanie Rieger (2012) Responsiveness is a characteristic

We’re getting there. Her addition is as valuable as LukeW starting point, but unfortunately it’s still missing the point in my opinion, the most important, critical and difficult decision. She has the answer between the lines, but she still talks about devices.

The user journey is the most important decision, not the technology. The discussion about technology, devices, optimization, etc, comes after you do your research and you verify if your users want to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way when at the laptop, when on the couch with a tablet and when around walking with a smartphone.

That’s the first decision.
The user journey.

And then, the two approaches might well converge. It’s not so strange as Stephanie was saying that you develop a mobile/tablet interface and you make it responsive, while having a completely different one on the desktop.

Once you start thinking about the journey, you see also clearly that when you say “No” in the decision tree above you might as well decide to go native instead of providing a website with device experience. It might be a wiser business decision.

The examples can be from the more extreme to the more obvious. If you are making a photo service, the focus of the device will be all around taking the photo and editing it, while the web counterpart on desktop and tablet might be focused on the fruition of beautiful galleries. It optimizes the flows, it reduces costs and creates better experiences.

Instead a news website probably will fit better being responsive since the objective and journey is very similar both on desktop and mobile: getting the news.

In a recent project I worked on the mobile experience was more focused around reporting and notifications, and the desktop about collaboration and interaction. It’s clear what was our choice there: a desktop website focused on facilitating the discussion and the interaction between people while the mobile website was focused around giving you at a glance the single update you wanted and the person to contact for that. It wasn’t possible to be built as responsive: not only the pages were different, but also the flows and the actions were different.

So, step back from the technical details at first, make the right decisions based on real user needs and activities, and then you can dig into all the technicalities you want.