It's about experimenting and discovering

It's hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It's about experimenting and discovering./p>

Anna Muoio, "How Is Your Company Like a Giant Hairball?" Fast Company, Dec 1997/Jan 1998

what makes a good feature

For various reasons this doesn’t work: Big piles of hit and miss features, chosen thoughtlessly, is less desirable that small piles of good features, chosen carefully. Consider this: what makes a good feature? It’s not an abstract quality: goodness means a problem is solved for a user. If you don’t spend some time considering who these people are and what they’re doing, odds are slim you’ll find features that matter much: unless of course you’re building the browser exclusively for people that that look, smell and think like you do.

Scott Berkun, "How to build a better web browser," scottberkun.com, Dec 2004 via Tomalak's Realm

at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy

The classic Atari games still show up on phones and other gadgets. Have you been surprised at how durable those games have been?

Bushnell: Actually not. I think that at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy. In some ways, the old games are a little bit purer because they completely focused on those elements instead of production values.

If you have a tournament chess player, they will only play with one kind of chess set. They don't want pieces made of glass or intricately carved things. All those production values that make very pretty chess sets actually make the game harder to play. In some ways, if you focus on production values and you short-change rules and structure, you end up with a poorer game than something that's really simple.

David Becker, "The return of King Pong," CNET News.com, 15 Mar 2005

rarely able to verbalize what their real needs are

Touhey began looking for new ways to inject excitement into his products. "Consumers are rarely able to verbalize what their real needs and problems are," says Touhey, who had previously worked at Bayer as a product manager for Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold Medicine. "When a moderator in a focus group asked about problems people had with basketballs, the number one answer was probably grip. But once the conversation was steered toward inflation, every hand would shoot up. Everyone had a story." Spalding managers had been aware of inflation frustration for years, but little had been done to address the problem.

The idea that changed how Spalding approached inflation hassles occurred on Thanksgiving Day, in 1998. As Touhey watched his father get ready to carve the family turkey, the birds plastic pop-up ther-mometer gave him the idea for a minia-turized pump that would reside inside the ball when not in use. ....

Spalding continues to seek out new insightsand not just by watching ballers on the playground or weekend warriors on the diamond. "A colleague clipped an ar-ticle about Pull-Ups diapers, of all things, that talked about how the diaper holds uncomfortable wetness against the toddlers skin for five minutes so that the kid seeks out potty training," says Touhey. "It got us thinking on new tangents. How could touch and feel become a part of learning good techniques for throwing a ball? Maybe new materials could show a thermal handprint on a football, so you could see if youre throwing with the right grip."

Jeremy B. Dann, "Spalding: An Idea with Bounce," Technology Review.com, April 2005

False similarities

As any logician will tell you, reasoning by analogy is a very dangerous game for most mortals. False similarities can capture our imagination, restrict our vision, and seduce us into seeing things that do not exist.

Franklin C. Spinney, "Genghis John," Proceedings of the U. S. Naval Institute, July 1997, pp. 42-47

batting .300 or .350

Let's talk about serial innovators. What's the secret to success?

I don't know if there's a secret to success. I've had a great deal of success myself. I also have had my share of failure. To me, being a great innovator is like batting in baseball. If you're batting .300 or .350, you're doing pretty well. Most people, they never get a hit. I try to think very hard about what's ultimately going to happen. Ultimately, everything's going to be wireless. Ultimately, everything's going to be portable. I figured that out a long time ago.

The trick is once you see that long-term vision, you then ask yourself, how do I get there step by step? You can't just solve all the problems at once and bingo, you have an industry. No, you have to solve a whole bunch of those problems, and along the way you have to make money while you're doing it.

And so what steps do you do? Even though I thought all computers would be mobile computers at some point, we said we can't do the wireless piece. We could do a connected organizer, and bingo, we did that. You always have the future vision in place. That tells you what you have to do.

"Voices Of Innovation: Jeff Hawkins," BusinessWeek, 11 Oct 2004.

killing our ability to make astonishing things

Profit is every CEO's major focus. Research almost always benefits an entire industry more than any particular company. And research doesn't have immediate results.

Sometimes it doesn't have the results that CEOs want. You invent a product that has a longer life-cycle, that doesn't need constant refills or upgrades. Research is expensive and unpredictable. Things that today's business world frowns on.

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow." Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

The damage to HP and the U.S. technology industry at large may already be irreversible. If we start investing today and let our engineers play we might have something exciting to show people in 2010. That's a long time to wait for the next big wow.

To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things.

As Told to Michelle Delio, "Carly's Way," TechnologyReview.com, 4 Mar 2005

More functions, more disappointment

The smart design decisions Apple made to bring digital music to life (everything from iPod autosync to the FairPlay digital rights management, or DRM, technology that makes the iTunes Music Store possible) interfere with a killer photo experience. In fact, any device that attempts to handle multiple applications and interaction models will disappoint in at least one of them.

Portable devices must be simple because of their size, which means fewer buttons to do things and less screen real estate to handle options. Simplicity does not end with the device; the entire connected experience--device, application and service--must be simple. The iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Music Store are brilliant in their simplicity as a single music application.

Photos are a lean-forward activity that centers on the screen, whereas music is a mostly lean-back activity where sound is the critical component. Delivering a killer photo experience would require a complete redesign of the device, application and service to make it dead simple to take pictures, manipulate them, print them, put them in slide shows and share them.

It's impossible to do all core tasks equally well, even within a single application like music. That's why iPod's song selection is simpler and easier than its song-rating feature. The challenge is to anticipate and prioritize the tasks correctly. Conflicting priorities can lead to flawed consumer experiences--one of the biggest challenges facing devices such as the BlackBerry 7520 and the Audiovox SMT5600. The correct task prioritization depends on whether a consumer uses the device primarily as a phone or as an e-mail device.

Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research), "Commentary: iPod Photo? Stick to music," CNET News.com 25 Feb 2005

The trick is knowing when to stop

With CG, you can produce infinite detail. The trick is knowing when to stop. "At a certain point, people look deformed, because the skin is realistic and all the folds are there." Bird says. "We struck a balance: We have eyebrow hair, but not nose hair."

"The 2005 Wired Rave Awards: Brad Bird for imagining The Incredibles," Wired, Mar 2005, p 84.

design is something that is best done slowly and carefully

AK Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you’re trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design. PARC is incorrectly credited with having invented the GUI. Of course, there were GUIs in the ’60s. But I think we did do one good thing that hadn’t been done before, and that was to realize the idea of change being eternal.

SF You never walk in the same river, otherwise known as Strachey streams.

AK The user interface, which is still the predominant approach today, is a user interface as the access to function. If the area is interesting, you eventually wind up with something that looks like the control panel of a nuclear reactor. So this is the agglutination of features.

SF Yes, a button on every pixel.

AK Corporate buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen?

This means improvements not only in the applications but also in the user interface itself. Some of those ideas were quite manifest in the original Macintosh, but are much less manifest in the Macs of today—and of course never really made it to Microsoft. That just wasn’t their way of thinking about things, and I think a programming language is the same way. Even if the user is an absolute expert, able to remember almost everything, I’m always interested in the difference between what you might call stark meaning and adjustable meaning.

I did quite a bit of study on that over the years to understand the influence of having something that you can read. It’s known that our basic language mechanism for both reading and hearing has a fast and a slow process. The fast process has basically a surface phrasal-size nature, and then there’s a slower one. This is why jokes require pauses; the joke is actually a jump from one context to another, and the slower guy, who is dealing with the real meanings, has to catch up to it.

There have been many, many studies of this. This argues that the surface form of a language, whatever it is, has to be adjustable in some form.

SF As you probably know, recent research has looked at how different parts of the brain recognize and react to jokes. Physically, they are quite distinct.

AK Yes. All creativity is an extended form of a joke. Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in—the one that we think is reality.

In the ’60s, one of the primary goals of the computer science community was to arrive at an extensible language. As far as I know, only three ever actually worked, and the first Smalltalk was one of those three. Another very interesting one was done by Ned Irons, who invented the term syntax-directed compiler and did one of the first ones in the ’60s. He did a wonderful extensible language called Imp.

One of the things that people realized from these extensible languages is that there is the unfortunate difficulty of making the meta-system easy to use. Smalltalk-72 was actually used by children. You’re always extending the language without realizing it when you are making ordinary classes. The result of this was that you didn’t have to go into a more esoteric place like a compiler compiler—Yacc or something like that—to add some extension to the language.

But the flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

"A Conversation with Alan Kay," Programming Languages, Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005.