ReifiyingHCI (part 1) - Investment in Team

This series of posts will be a sort of ecclectic collection of thoughts and observations from my dual-life as an entrepreneur and academic. They will be posted in fairly random order, and in fairly random order of importance. Some of these observations and personal discoveries may be common knowledge to those of you reading this, but others may find them surprising. Here goes:

Having lived (on cans of tuna - no bread - for lunch) through the dot com crash of the early 2000's and watched first-hand the startup investment game, one of the things i always wondered about was how any investor - angel, venture, institutional - made such a large decision to invest millions of dollars in an unproven concept. There are of course a number of factors that go into the decision (investment horizons for their fund, the way a prospective investee fits into their existing portfolio of companies, acceptable rates of failure, etc), but perhaps the most interesting fact that i learned is that investment folks invest less in the concept than they do in the team that came up with it. In HCI/d education, we speak very little about the character, the personality and the charisma of the design team, but in fact the people with the most money to lose actually place the highest value on these things.

..and when considered for more than a second, this makes sense. Markets change. Economies change. Societies change. When an investor puts money into a venture, they are betting against a 3-5 year future which, in a society that is, according to Marshall McLuhan, moving at electric speed (very fast), is likely to be completely and unpredictably different in 3-5 years than it is today. Therefore the concept that an investor sees in front of them today is likely to be obsolete tomorrow. They expect this. Therefore the thing that is the most likely to provide a good return on their investment is the team that came up with the concept - and especially their energy, process and smarts to be able to keep coming up with more concepts to adapt to the rapidly changing environment.

In a fairly recent presentation, Idris Mootee, CEO of Idea Couture - a strategy/design firm, showed the following slide with the characteristics of highest importance to Angel and Venture Capital investors. From my talks so far with investors and entrepreneurs, it appears to be pretty accurate:



Some potential implications of this:

• A hyper-efficient iterative design process that can communicate well to all stakeholders (including investors) is clearly more important the one or two good epiphanic designs.
• Investors may want to understand your process. If they can see how you got to today, they can plot a trajectory to where you might be tomorrow, which is what they really care about.
  
• Investors are more design-oriented than is obvious at first glance. They just speak a different language.
• Trustworthiness is more important to investors than either sales potential or the entrepreneur's experience. People who don't have their ethical house in order probably will have a hard time surviving.
  
• Choosing and managing a team is of primary importance when starting any organization
  

ReifiyingHCI (part 1)

The process of starting a business has been extremely intense and interesting. It has forced me to learn about design and the reification of design (a.k.a. business) by drinking from the firehose of practice as well as from the water fountain of books. I would highly recommend the process to anyone who wants to learn at a rapid rate. Over the next few months, i will be blogging more about the process of starting BigTreeTop.com from an HCI/d perspective. I have been relatively quiet about our business until now because a) just about every spare moment is taken up with other academic and business activities, and b) i wanted to first, before writing, ensure that i had a good handle on what is smart - from an intellectual property perspective - to write about publicly (if i had my way, all IP would be out on the table for the world to kick around, but people better-versed than am i in the ways of current legal/business practice convinced me that this would have been a bad idea).

To my colleagues at IU Informatics: If i've been a bit distracted in classes and meetings over the course of the past 6 months, i hope that you won't take it personally. The thousands of tasks around getting an idea like BigTreeTop off the ground are pretty good at pushing themselves consistently to the forefront of one's consciousness, especially when paired with simultaneous PhD work. This will probably continue for a while longer, but my hope is that, in time, the effort will produce a living, breathing organization that that we can all use as a test bed for HCI/d research, as well as an experiment the result of which we can analyze and from which we can all learn.

I hope that the upcoming series of musings is interesting information for those of you currently studying HCI/d, for those of you now practicing it, and for those of you who have an idea that you would like to some day make a reality in the form of a real live organization.

Identity as Advertising

This is also posted at (http://interactionculture.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/identity-as-advertising/)

Without getting into the deeper philosophical concept of identity as performance or sign, i find the recent news of MySpace founder Tom Andersen’s alleged age-shifting mildly amusing.

“Tom Anderson, the co-founder of MySpace and the first friend to anyone who creates a MySpace profile, isn’t really 32 like it says on his MySpace profile. His Wikipedia entry, which says he was born in 1975, is also incorrect. How old is he really? We first heard 40. We dug a little online and came up with nothing. But then we got a senior person at MySpace to talk to us about it off record at the Web 2.0 Summit last week: this person confirmed that he’s really “36 or 37″ and that MySpace has been trying to keep this quiet for some time.“
(Source: TechCrunch)

In considering identity, and its perhaps often fractured online nature, i had never given much thought to the idea that the identities of higher-profile folks would be knowingly and grossly manipulated as a branding move. As the first mega social networking success story, MySpace has been a lightning-rod in the past for the criticisms that people in social networks lie about their identity. It is usually treated as though dishonesty on MySpace is a violation of its intended use. The funny fact here is that every MySpace/user relationship begins at the outset with false identity when a 40-year old Tom Andersen, claiming to be 32, becomes everyone’s first friend, so perhaps it is the people who are truthful about their identity in MySpace who are transgressing its intended use.

Emerging Challenges for Brand

I just posted this in another location as part of a discussion on the major challenges today for "Business Strategy and Brand." I thought it might be interesting for folks here to read it as well:

One way that brand is changing (has changed already, i think) is that the relationship between brand and the transitive property is changing as a result of increased connectivity and the rise of popularity systems like Google's pagerank.

Okay, now that was quite a loaded sentence, but i think it's pretty straightforward once we get past the overblown vocabulary and into the practical concepts.

Before the social web came along and before traditional advertising started its freefall, the 'transitive property' was used by companies in the form of celebrity endorsements of brand, because hey, if Bill Cosby likes Jello and I like Bill Cosby, then surely i will like and buy Jello (this is the transitive property).

So formerly the relationship was:
[brand] to [endorser] to [consumer]

or more concretely:

[Jello] to [Bill Cosby and one or two friends] to [me]

Now, with the advent of the social web (now people can massively connect with each other) and the rise of the core idea of Google pagerank (something is good if lots of people like it, and those people are in turn liked by a lot of other people who are in turn liked by a lot of other people, etc..), the new relationship is:

[brand] to [hundreds of connected authorities on the brand] to [me]

or more concretely:

[Jello] to [the Jello customer community] to [me]

..So, i'm predicting that a major part of the new concept of brand is the community itself, which both explicitly (by promoting the brand through word of mouth) and implicitly (by acting as a sort of 'brand pagerank' that give the brand authority just by virtue of their involvement with it) constitute a major part of the brand.

So-called "marketers" in this new world will therefore need to be community builders - not by inclusion only, but also by empowerment. Customer involvement (a noble idea in its day) will have to evolve into customer empowerment, which will allow the community to do its work in building a large part of a trusted, vibrant brand.

Tip for Job Seekers - Anticipate and Persist

I was talking with a friend earlier in the week about his job search, and it occurred to me that there are two incredibly helpful things that he could do to set himself apart from %90 of the other applicants. Hopefully these help you too. Both of these ideas make the most sense when viewed from the perspective of the hiring manager or the company. You'll see what i mean in a minute:

Anticipate!
When seeking a job with a company, don't talk to them about ways that you can fit into their existing initiatives. Anticipate where the company is going and talk to them - even better: show them ways that you will be able to help them to get there. Key things to remember:

• every healthy organization is trying to go somewhere better than where they are today
• if the organization is not moving in a direction - or if your hiring manager isn't aware of that direction, you might want to think twice about working there
  
• in healthy organizations, the most desirable and interesting hires are those who can help the organization to get to tomorrow's destination

Persist!
If you are reasonably sure that you are well-suited for a position, don't immediately take "no" for an answer. Healthy organizations that are moving in new directions need people who won't take immediate "no"s for answers in their daily work. Your interactions with a hiring manager may be a great first chance to show this ability.

I'll end this post with a story that shows the power of using these two principles:

In 1997 i interviewed with Ron, a Senior Technical writer at Walt Disney Imagineering for a contract position as an Assistant Technical writer with the Show Ride Engineering group. After what i thought was a very positive interview, i was later informed by the contract agency that Ron had passed on hiring me, stating that he thought i was not the right guy for the job. My immediate (and not much thought-out reaction, i must confess) was to ask the contract agency representative to call Ron back and let him know that i was sure that i was the right guy for the job. After a short negotiation she did so grudgingly, and called back, surprised that Ron had scheduled a second interview with me the next day.

From the first interview, i remembered that Ron had mentioned a new push to put all of Imagineering's technical documentation in web format for wireless access by the engineers. Though the job description was for a pure technical writer, when i went back to meet with Ron the second time, i mentioned that i had an interest in the digitization effort, and reminded him of my previous experience that might be of use.

Ron hired me on the spot, i ended up working there for a full year, and Ron and I became friends. He even offered at the end of my contract to write up a letter of personal recommendation. Toward the end of my tenure there Ron told me that the fact that i had the gumption to (respectfully) disagree with his opinion showed drive, personal self-knowledge, and that i had the gumption necessary to stand up to the political pressures in Imagineering.

I would say that these traits are desirable to any organization, and your first meeting/negotiation is a great place to display them.

Even if you Can Beat Facebook.. Maybe You Shouldn't

There's been a bit of a flap recently in Britain, where it is reported that %70 of employers are banning or restricting access to social networking sites like Facebook.

It strikes me as odd that this occurs simultaneous to the new big focus in business on finding new sources of innovation.

Call me naive, but i can't help but think that if these companies made work more stimulating by proving a way for their employees to innovate at work through (digitally augmented) social means, that Facebook would not be a problem anymore. Heck, they might even do it via a plugin.

First Two BigTreeTop Idea Games Go Live!

The first game was launched by one of our original testers Goods for Cooks - a great Bloomington cooking goods store. The game, brainchild of Andrew, one of the owners, provides GFC's customers with a chance to help determine the next proprietary coffee blend that they will be offering in the store. If you're a customer of GFC and want to give them some ideas or just vote on the ones that other people have posted, head over to the game before September 7th.

Mother Bear's Pizza - a famous Bloomington Pizza Parlor - has recently joined the BigTreeTop Alpha testing program, and jumped right in today with both feet, launching a "Best NEW Pizza Idea" game to better understand what types of pizzas their customers might really love. The top vote-getter will receive a free pizza. If you fancy yourself an expert on pizza (what red-blooded american doesn't?), post your idea and vote on the ideas you like before September 13th!

Both of these efforts represent exciting, small first steps by these two businesses who a) think that their customers are smart and b) want to involve them more intimately in shaping their business.

The idea game is part of an overall new methodology we're working on for businesses called CLIC (Community, Listen, Implement, Communicate). Different from the more traditional methodology that i might call RIB (Research, Implement, Broadcast - which chunks together a lot of things like design, development, etc - but you get the point), it claims that customers and businesses (as well as their local economies, in the long run) both create value by co-creating the business itself. This can help to solve a few problems simultaneously:

• Advertising is less about broadcasting to people who may not want to listen
• Advertising is more about communicating to people who actually care about the business
  
• Figuring out what customers want is much easier if one is talking to them regularly

As you might imagine, there is much more to the CLIC methodology, as well as some unadvertised potential outcomes of the Goods for Cooks and Mother Bear's idea games (you'll have to participate to find out), but i will end this post here, with a pretty illustration, because illustrations are cool.

Supper Solutions - Great Grad Student Deal

One of the BigTreeTop.com Alpha Testers is Supper Solutions - a local "meal assembly kitchen." For those of you not familiar with the concept (i wasn't), I think it is a fantastic idea for grad students (among other people), so i decided to try out two of their meals for myself and write about it here.

One of the biggest benefits is cost. For about $3.40 per meal, folks can drop by their kitchen and self-prepare 12 good healthy meals in about 1.5 - 2 hours that they can then bring home and freeze until it's time to eat. Each meal serves 2-3 people, so that's 36 meal servings. They also have an option where they will pre-prepare the meals for you ahead of time for pickup. This would bring the price up to about $4.16 per meal. If there is sufficient interest, Kirsten, the owner is considering offering delivery drop-off at INFO or Eigenmann for folks who don't have transportation.

To try this out fully, Esther and i recently visited Supper Solutions and prepared 2 meals for ourselves. We decided to try the Mexican Calzones and the Spicy Patong Pork. (this month's menu is online here)


Once at the Supper Solutions kitchen, the entire process of making the 2 meals, putting them in bags and affixing cooking instruction labels took about 10 minutes. The meal preparation stations were spotless and extremely well-organized, so it was extremely easy to do - even for those of us who are culinarily disadvantaged. While at Supper Solutions, we ran into our next door neighbor and one of Esther's co-workers who both raved about Supper Solutions. One, a local advertising professional, was visiting for the 3rd time, while the other, a doctor, is a long-time customer.


Once home, we decided to first try the Mexican Calzones for dinner. The directions are included right on the packaging (see first photo to the right). We popped it on a pan and into the toaster oven for 20 minutes, and they came out perfectly good. They were quite large and filling. Each one was pretty much a complete meal.

Two evenings later, we made the Spicy Patong Pork. Again the instructions were on the bag, and it was quite easy to make. After about 10 minutes preparation (briefly sauteeing the pork, adding the sauce and microwaving the pre-cooked rice), we had a complete meal of pork and brown rice. It was very very good (see last photo to the right).

If you are a busy grad student, do yourself a favor and look into this. It's great food, very economical, healthy, and will help to keep food expenses predictable each month. Besides, by buying from Supper Solutions, you'll be supporting a small local business who, as an early and enthusiastic support of BigTreeTop, is serious about co-creating value with their customers, not just padding their bottom line :)

Full disclosure: As an Alpha Tester of BigTreeTop.com, i have an emotional bias toward Supper Solutions, but not a financial one (they are not paying customers). Additionally, i should reveal that i am now chemically dependent on the Mexican Calzones, which are really good..

Here's their contact info:
Supper Solutions
2616 Walnut
Bloomington, IN 47401
812-333-8009

Email:
bloomington@suppersolutionsinc.com

Intersection:
In Walnut Station, Corner of S.Walnut and Country Club Road Next to Dominos Pizza

"Want" vs. "Should" Decisions - When People Choose the Broccoli over the Baby Ruth

This is a replica of another blog post at http://btt.bigtreetop.com/blog/view?id=3&post=21, which is more business-oriented, but i think the concept has rather large HCI/d implications, so i'm posting it here as well.

Most people, when making decisions, have to choose between "want" and "should" decisions. But what makes a person choose one over the other?

A recent Harvard Business School Article Understanding the 'Want' vs. 'Should' Decision (link to Harvard Business School's website) helps to answer this. Based on a number of studies of purchasing and voting behavior, as well as some older work in Construal Level Theory, explained nicely in the paper Temporal Construal (link to pdf paper by Trope and Liberman). The studies show that the further away the implementation of a decision is (future or past), the more people will favor a ‘should’ decision over a ‘want’ one.

As a simple example, if someone asks me to decide on and eat immediately either Broccoli or a Baby Ruth candy bar, i am more likely to choose the candy bar, since it's what i want right now. If, on the other hand, a person asks me to decide right now what i will eat at a later time (or if they ask me later what i should have eaten previously), i am more likely to choose the broccoli. What this suggests is that the further away from the present the consequences of my decision are, the more likely i am to choose what i should do.

In the article, the authors state this this "should/want" factor is the reason that most grocery stores place their produce section directly at the front entrance, while the candy bars and trashy magazines appear at the cash registers - to ensure that when walking through the "should" section (healthy produce) shoppers are furthest from the point of consumption (which will probably happen at home, long after they leave the store), and simultaneously to ensure that when entering the "want" section (candy bars), shoppers are the closest to the point of consumption (which most likely will occur in the store or soon after leaving it).

This is an important consideration for HCI/d folks

1) If you are designing a "should" application (something that is more good for the user but less instantly-gratifying), or one that provides the user with "should" features, the further in advance a person makes the decision, the more likely they may be to choose your "should" service over a "want".

2) If you are providing a "want" service, you will need to ensure that your users make the decision as close as possible to the time of consumption - by offering quick setup of their account, express checkout, immediate delivery, etc.

3) It seems to me that offering both "wants" and "shoulds" as a complimentary mix might be a good idea for any design.

4) Since, according to the Trope/Liberman paper, Construal is also related not just to temporal distance, but also spatial, i wonder what this means for distributed communities (i.e., if i am chatting online with a person and can see that they are on the other side of the world, is my experience different than if i know that they are in the same town)

I'll be exploring this further, both in my academic research, and as part of BigTreeTop.com, where we present our users simultaneous "want" and "should" options - that we may want to present differently to maximize their use.

Here is a quote from Trope and Liberman's paper:


"CLT (Construal Level Theory) suggests that temporal distance affects preferences and judgments by changing the way individuals mentally represent future events. The greater the temporal distance from future events, the more likely are the events to be represented in terms of a few abstract and core features (highlevel construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and superficial features (low-level construals). Therefore, temporal distance changes judgments and decisions because in the distant future, compared with the near future, judgments and decisions are more likely to reflect the evaluative and informational implications of high-level construals than those of low-level construals."

American Revolution Decided by Rock-Paper-Scissors

On July 4th my wife and I were watching a documentary on the American Revolution when i began to laugh out loud. Now there aren't many funny things about the revolution, but now there is one. It seems that the name of the French general who really turned the tide of the war was Comte de Rochambeau. Rochambeau is another name (Reaux, Sham, Beaux) for the game Rock Paper Scissors, which, for those of you who are uninitiated, is perhaps the most common way in America for settling simple disputes between two people.

I now have a permanent and vivid image in my mind of a flamboyant French general approaching the British lines, banging his right fist in his left open palm, deciding the fate of America.

New Blog for a While

For the next few months, i'll be blogging primarily through another blog at http://btt.bigtreetop.com/blog/view?id=3. The content will orbit loosely around a few of my current areas of inquiry and endeavor:

1) How organizations (and even more specifically small businesses - since that is the current focus of BigTreeTop.com) can deeply involve the constituents of those organizations in substantive participation as a part of more sustainable strategic, operational and marketing practices.

2) The ways that computers can augment and/or enable these practices

3) The ways that consumers (for current lack of a better term) can contribute to local and national economic sustainability by deeper involvement in small businesses

4) How the academy and business can and need to form alliances that benefit the world

5) How strategy is sexy

Of Farmers and Environmentalists

Christopher Bunn, a friend of mine from former grad school days is continuing to fight a long battle in central coastal California for the autonomy of the local farmers there. His family owns a lettuce farm, and though i must confess i still am under-informed about the plight of farmers in environmentally-charged areas, it sounds like a pretty tough battle.

Christopher's written/recorded a slew of great protest and political songs about this and other topics. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, the process is darn entertaining to listen to.

My favorites include

• Southern Drawl Doll - about Hillary Clinton's (and most any politician's) propensity to change their accent to fit their constituency
  
• Frogs on the Edge of the Ocean - about frog protection on the coast of California
• Landwatch (what i learned as a kid) - about eminent domain land grabs
  

Bringing the Love Back

Thanks to David Armano at Logic+Emotion for catching this video that aptly personifies the problems consumers are having with traditional advertising. As many of you know, a new company i'm currently starting is all about using some deep-rooted organizational, marketing and HCI (and even a little bit of economic) theory to create real conversations and relationships between local businesses and their customers, so that they can finally stop treating their customers like numbers. Enjoy:




I'm very much looking forward to launching www.bigtreetop.com to helping bring the love back. Soon.

..And if all goes well, i'll likely be presenting our idea, the theory behind it, preliminary research results and lessons learned in a colloqium in the Fall.

17 out of 20 (a.k.a. 'calling any psychologists)

Here's a very very interesting informal experiment in aptitude, concentration and execution.

For about 5 years now, i've been playing basketball at least once a week with other players. Often, though, when thinking through a particularly difficult business or academic problem, i can think best alone on a basketball court with just a ball, a basket, and my thoughts. I am quite sure that this is due to the slight distraction that it provides, clearing the way for new perspectives to emerge on the problem at hand - similar to the way that focusing on an ocean vista can help in thinking about a weightly personal decision.

Over the last 5 years, i've played a game with myself during these thinking sessions to see how many foul shots in a row i can shoot. Since i've played a lot of sports in my life, this is more a mental exercise than a physical one. This is to say that, for the sake of analyzing yesterday's results of this experiment, the physical part of it can be almost completely removed where foul shots are concerned. They are not physically difficult, but instead require mental attentiveness.

Here is the part which is extremely interesting:

Over the last 5 years, i can recount anecdotally that hitting 5 foul shots in a row has occurred probably in the neighborhood of %25 of the time. This is to say that 1/4 of the times that i've played this game with myself, i've been able to hit 5 out of 5. Probably another %10 of the time i've been able to hit 10 out of 10. About once a year, i'm able to hit 20 out of 20. These statistics are probably pretty consistent with anyone who did not play organized basketball (and therefore did not do freethrow drills every day at practice) - who would have a higher percentage than i do.

Yesterday, to increase the challenge, i took the first foul shot with my eyes closed, expecting decreased results. This is to say that i stood at the line, prepared for the shot looking at the hoop, closed my eyes and took the shot. I hit the first 3 in a row. Then the next 4 (7 in a row). Then the next 2 (9 in a row). Then i missed a shot (9 out of 10). Deciding that this was worth testing, i kept shooting. When all was said and done, i had hit 17 out of 20 of the shots, with my eyes closed - something i'd rarely been able to do in 5 years with my eyes open. Due to time constraints, i then left, baffled. This was one of the best shooting percentages in 5 years - with my eyes closed. Hitting one of these shots could have been a fluke. But it is difficult to think that hitting this many in a row is a chance event.

My observations of the event:

• i found myself preparing more thoroughly for the shot because i knew i had to if i wanted to have a prayer of putting each one through the hoop
• on the shots i missed, i could actually tell how the shot was going to miss (left, right, short), even before opening my eyes, by feeling how the ball left my hand, and visualizing its flight
• i was forced to completely visualize the shot before taking it
• shooting the ball felt completely different with my eyes closed

Other observations:

• anecdotally, i remember playing some of my best volleyball games in college and while trying to make the AVP tour (Association of Volleyball Professionals) when sick or slightly injured

My preliminary hypotheses:

• for a person who has done a task frequently over a long period of time (but who knows the task pretty well), shutting down their primary skill can force them to shift to a secondary - but perhaps more powerful skill in accomplishing a task - occasionally with better results. In this case i had to rely on visualization much more heavily than in the past. In the past, a sickness or slight injury forced me to rely more on knowledge than strength to try and win a game.
• latent, underutilized skills can lie dormant and unused in people until radical change forces their use
• people don't automatically use their best skill or set of skills when accomplishing a task

What do you all think? Assuming yesterday's events were not a fluke, what are some possible causes? What does it mean for us as HCI Designers, business people, teachers, etc. as we design tools and environments that should enable employees, students and users to achieve the highest results?

Should we intentionally shake up people's routines in order to test/develop other skills?

* Note: i will be trying the experiment again later this week and posting the results.

Innovation in Business

For those of you who are missing it, the business world is starting to embrace and even develop their own design stance, as a result of their awareness of the need to true innovation. One of the guys who has gotten lots of eyeballs of late is David Armano, a Creative VP at Digitas, who recently wrote an article for Business Week on "It's The Conversation Economy, Stupid."

I posted a similar concept back in November about the designer as novelist. http://briggzay.blogspot.com/2006/11/designer-linguist-not-novelist.html

David and the whole creative business culture are pushing hard to understand design as it plays out in the business world, and are coming along nicely, i think, given the immense challenge of marrying our modernistic industrial revolution ethos with more post-modern societal tendencies. In my experience, this is an exciting, challenging space.

The Rise of the Consumer

Great video on YouTube about the rise of the powerful consumer here.

Civilicon Disobedience.

I had a funny experience recently that just popped back into mind tonight, so i thought i'd share it with all of you. On a recent trip to Boston, i was picked up and treated to the best "taxi" ride ever in Jeremi Karnell's moxified new BMW SUV on our way to a MITX panel discussion. Immediately upon exiting the hotel garage, the automated voice navigation lady informed us in a sultry synthesized voice that "if possible, please make an illegal left-hand turn onto Huntington Avenue."

Hunh. Sivilicon Disobedience. I half expected her to suggest next: "if possible, please turn right and head toward Walden Pond. Live deliberately. It's only a few miles from here."

Designer - Linguist not Novelist

At a presentation tonight by visiting professor Josh Tennenberg, a discussion arose about the "problematizing" of the role of designers in a world where design research seems to be finding more and more that the outsourcing of design to the end user (participatory design, experience co-creation, innovation democratization, etc) produces a better design.

My thoughts on this?

Glad you asked - or at least kept reading so far. As designers find themselves outsourcing design and innovation to the users themselves, they become no less "designerly." Instead, it is merely that the locus of the value that they add to the process shifts. This process of locus-shifting is not without historical precedent. Education itself has seen this shift occur, for example. Where once the educator was seen as the disseminator of knowledge and the students as the receivers, now a good educator is often a facilitator that creates the space in which students learn. Where in a monarchy, the ruler was seen as the maker of laws and the determiner of ethics, democracy attempts to create the space in which the people govern themselves. So i see that designers are no longer the designers of designs that consumers consume. Instead they are becoming the designers of the spaces in which consumers (though this name will need to change) can configure and create their own designs.

But there is something more. For the last few months, i have been working on understanding this "space-creating activity", continually conceiving of it as "creating a space" into which user/consumer creativity could pour. But this would merely make the designer a demolition man, blasting holes in the earth in hopes that people would then spontaneously construct mansions. This is as ludicrous as the theories of extreme anarchism, which seek to destroy government in hopes that a civilized society will spontaneously form.

No, the new designer is not a demolition man, but a linguist. Where once the designer acted as a novelist, striving to put together for an unskilled public just the perfect work of literature that would educate, entertain, embolden them, now the designer is a linguist, who creates for her skilled public the grammar, the language, that the user/consumer can easily learn, use and re-use to create their own works of art.

MITX Panel Discussion

This Tuesday i participated in a panel discussion in Boston around the current research methods in the marketing space (event website here), at the request of One to One Interactive, who sponsored the event. The presentations and discussion was much too short to have any substantive dialogue, but some extremely interesting questions were raised by the industry-focused folks in the audience, and i came away with some thoughts, written here. Each of the 5 panelists presented 10 minutes of their own thinking, and the floor was then opened to 60 minutes of questions, moderated by Sandy Pentland.

There were a few things that struck me as interesting, noted here in short form:

Lowered Technological Barriers
The digitization of commerce and of marketing is lowering the bar for tracking and measurement. The more that consumer engagement is digitized, the easier it is to map those bits to other bits, and to try to gain semantic (what does it mean when a friend sends a piece of media to another friend) and structural (what does the sending of the media say about the structures that allow the sending to occur) meaning from the relationship between those bits. Dr. Carl Marci and his company Innerscope are doing some extremely interesting research on BioMeasures as indicators of what they call "engagement". I will be writing more on this in the coming weeks. S. Adam Brazel and his lab are also doing some very interesting work in eyetracking. The fact that this is economically feasible is a result of the capabilities and lowering cost of the enabling technologies.

The recent lowering of the barriers for end user participation has been significant. High School-age netizens now have better knowledge and easier tools with which to create their own media. As one small example, ~300,000 amateur flash artifacts have been created and uploaded to http://www.newgrounds.com/ an amateur multimedia community. This presents a unique opportunity and challenge for marketing folks concerned with the spread of the "brand" of a product or company. As the loci of media production become more dispersed (anyone can create media), and the channels for their distribution become greater (everyone has multiple channels through which they can share all or part or a modified version of that media), the complexity of the operational and of the analytical task of marketing through media channels becomes more and more complex.

Increased Connectivity/Fracturing of Attention
This is of course a long-touted trend, but it is nonetheless steadily coming. A person's (and therefore a population's) attention is becoming more and more fractured as they interact with the digital via mobile devices, computers, laptops, etc etc. For the field of marketing (which actually covers the processes from product ideation all the way to product support), this is a grand new challenge. What marketers commonly refer to as cross-channel marketing can be challenging to manage and to measure.

Humanities and Science
In a recent conversation with Jeff Bardzell , he pointed out the fact that the humanities are very good at asking questions, and at interpreting the answers, but that the hard sciences do the best job of actually answering the question. It was clear to me that all 40-or-so participants (both audience and panelists) in the MITX discussion were open to this view as well. In the discussion, i brought up the question of CGM (consumer-generated media) as a means of advertising. This area of inquiry is a good example of one that is difficult to explain without repeatedly crossing the (i think arbitrary and unnecessary) humanities/science rubicon.

My approach so far at looking at this has been a philosophical one (humanities) to understand the user, the aesthetic, and the experience (thanks to Jeff Bardzell for re-introducing me to my formative thinking in the humanities - and from that to generate some falsifiable hypotheses (science) about the user and network-level dynamics at work in the massive spread and extension of media like Numa Numa and the Star Wars Kid. I am currently considering the design of some studies that will examine CGM phenomena from a semiotic (humanities), network (science), and perhaps even pre-cognitive (science) perspective. My instincts tell me that these will generate some good analytical and perhaps even predictive knowledge. At the end, though, when all of the data is in, i will likely resort to a cultural (humanities) analysis of the results of my empirical research - especially as it pertains to the culture of business to consumer relations in which we currently find ourselves.

In conclusion, i think that there are huge opportunities for all willing to involve themselves in a multi-directional dialectic between business and the academy, humanities and the sciences in pursuit of understanding and productive use of some of the most powerful forces in our world today - media, end-users and businesses. I am very much enjoying the process of diving into this complicated but fruitful space.

Split Personality

In any sort of project where functions of business, design and production are separated from each other (software, landscaping, architecture, music where Quincy Jones is concerned), there is an "interesting" tension between the business person, the designer and the producer. The epic battles that often occur between software designers and software coders is highlighted in Alan Cooper's book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, and i have seen similar struggles over and over throughout my career.

CEO of 25 million dollar publishing firm with a dollar-shaped twinkle in his eyes (otherwise brilliant business man and designer of sorts): Alright team, we've got an email list of 3000 people that are just champing at the bit to buy this video. Every one of them needs to make instant online payments via credit card through our system by Friday. This is the web. I love the speed of the web!

Web Team of the same 25 million dollar publishing firm with somewhat bleary eyes: Um, we don't have an online credit card payment processing system. This company has always worked on a subscription basis.

CEO: What? But [100 million dollar publishing firm's name omitted] processes credit cards online all the time. How hard can it be?

Web Team: It's not actually that "hard", it's just that the 3-4 day payment gateway approval process will put us at 1 day before launch before we can even test the system.

CEO: Great, so we'll be ready to take payments on Friday!

Web Team: Um, Ready to take test payments, perhaps, but when processing credit card transactions it's important to test at least..

CEO: - That's great. Make it so! (with thin star-trek reference)

Such struggles highlight 3 very different approaches to the same problem. In the above example, the business and design functions were both accomplished by the CEO.

As far as i can tell, one of the main sources of problems between the three in any given project is lack of cognitive capacity. It is a well-known fact that the human brain can only attend to a certain number of things at once. When dissention breaks out in a project, it seems to me, it is not so much that the business person cannot understand the point of view of the designer, or that the designer cannot comprehend the constraints of the producer. Rather, it is that any one of them cannot cognitively attend to the needs of more than one approach at one time. Given an extended period of time (and assuming that they have the core knowledge necessary to do so), the designer might be able to shift their attention and take on the role of the business person, or the business person that of the producer. What is virtually impossible, however, is for them to be effective in all roles simultaneously.

This fact has recently come to the fore of my mind as i continue work on a set of theories, tools and methodologies for SMB's (small to midsized businesses). In this work, i've simultaneously held all three roles for an extended period of time, and it's been quite a ride. My initial role was as part designer and part business person (the tools and methodologies are designed to be offered in the end as a business). Once that was started, the next step was to switch into producer role, in which i did some heavy research into the best digital frameworks and tools for production of the online platform that is part of the business. Next it was back to the designer role, where i worked to develop new tools that would serve the theoretical underpinnings of the concept. Simultaneously in the business role, i worked to ensure that the solution would still be marketable and profit-worthy, as well as theoretically sound. Finally, since some of the tools were best put into digital form, i entered hard-core producer role, creating an online enterprise application .

I've found, as a result of this sort of auto-ethnographic research, some interesting insights:

• For the most part, my usual level of business, design and production abilities each diminished when combined simultaneously with another. The degree of diminishment (sp?) seems to positively correlate with the size of the project (i.e., at the beginning of the project when it was fairly small, combining the three roles caused almost no perceivable loss of effectiveness in any of them. This seems to suggest that this is related to cognitive capacity.
  
  
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