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.

Fancy that

"Let's get inside the head of the Tide customer," he said. Using an array of cutting-edge research tools to learn how customers use media first, you can then develop ads that consumers will actually find interesting. Fancy that. Verklin took over management of five of P&G's top-10 brands on October 1. The self-described "media geek" has inherited the earth.

"Fast 50: #49 Media Maven, David Verklin," Fast Company, Mar 2005, p. 63.

enjoy the process, not the product

The number of ideas and designs that will ever see production is only a tiny fraction of those generated. Changes in clients and buyer tastes doom many. In a single day, a number are proven impractical for reasons of material, cost, or fabrication. The staff must leave the casualties behind and move on. Offering a prescription for happiness for designers, Bogner says, "You have to enjoy the process, not the product.

Phil Patton with Michael Graves Design Group, Michael Graves Designs: The Art of the Everyday Object, Melcher Media, 2004, p. 69.

we're only paid for breakthroughs

JENNINGS: And you say it keeps you on your toes, you have such a huge portion of the market — in all elements of technology. Is the tendency in the shop sometimes to think that we just can't be beaten?

GATES: No, in fact that's one thing I like about the Microsoft culture — is that we wake up everyday thinking about companies like Wang or Digital Equipment, or Compact, that were huge companies that did very well and they literally have disappeared. Got bought up, you know went into a direction that was a dead end for them. So we have that lesson and we are always saying to ourself — we have to innovate. We got to come up with that breakthrough. In fact the way software works — so long as you are using your existing software — you don't pay us anything at all. So we're only paid for breakthroughs. We have to make a new version of Windows or Office that you think is worth going out and buying.

Peter Jennings, "One-on-One with Bill Gates," ABC News, 16 Feb 2005.

Good design is clear thinking made visible

It was pleasing to hear Tufte call his fifth principle the most important. "Good design is clear thinking made visible," he says. Throughout the day, Tufte constantly poked fun at the cartoon icons and rainbow effects in many of the examples, noting that these embellishments were there to obscure the fact that the images contained little content.

....

"Only two industries refer to their customers as 'users'," he quipped, obviously disenchanted with his experiences with the computer industry and software interfaces. "The most common user activity of a web site is to flee as quickly as possible."

Eugene Eric Kim, "Tufte on Visualizing Information," ERCB, originally appeared on Dr Dobbs Journal Web Site in August, 1997.

Good design is clear thinking made visible, bad design is stupidity made visible.

Jason Fried, "A little Tufte recap" Signal vs. Noise, 27 Aug 2004

when the goals are worth it to them

In my view, it’s not “relevance,” that’s lacking for this generation, it’s engagement. What’s the relevance of Pokémon, or Yu-Gi-Oh, or America’s Idol? The kids will master systems ten times more complex than algebra, understand systems ten times more complex than the simple economics we require of them, read far above their grade level – when the goals are worth it to them. On a recent BBC show “Child of our Time,” a 4-year-old, who was a master of the complex video game Halo 2, was being offered so-called “learning games” that were light-years below his level, to his total frustration and rage.

So how can and should they – and we – do this? As with games, we need to fund, experiment, and iterate. Can we afford it? Yes, because, ironically, creating engagement is not about those fancy, expensive, graphics, but rather about ideas. Sure, today’s video games have the best graphics ever, but the kids’ long-term engagement in a game depends much less on what they see, than on what they do and learn. In gamer terms, “gameplay” trumps “eye-candy” any day of the week.

Marc Prensky, “Engage Me or Enrage Me” What Today’s Learners Demand, www.marcprensky.com, Feb 2005.

You don't get a gazelle by breeding dinosaurs

All of this money spent in spite of the fact that more than half of all corporate mergers fail to create substantial returns for shareholders according to a study by A. T. Kearney, Inc. And, innovation guru, Gary Hamel, calls this the mating of dinosaurs and finds no correlation between size and profitability. "You don't get a gazelle by breeding dinosaurs," he concludes.

Joyce Wycoff, "Gazelles and Dinosaurs," Heads Up! on Organizational Innovation, 9 Feb 2005