MarshWorks

This New York Times article titled Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike resonates with me.

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

As a product designer, I see problems that need solutions that pull widely from many fields. But somehow, just getting the experts from all those fields into the room doesn't create innovation: just innovation death by committee. I've always felt that innovation is about listening - listening with respect and genuine get-your-mind-around-the-other-viewpoint understanding.

By listening, I can bring those competing expert viewpoints into a single holistic mental picture, and thus create something truly unique without suffering committee death: in the end I hold the whole picture of the product in my mind and can work out each detail until it is sketched, prototyped, and implemented.

This article expands my view of the "da Vinci model", as I think of it. It says:

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says.

The renaissance-thinker is wildly interdisciplinary. He sees relationships outside his own immediate expertise, because he either has multiple expertises or is able to truly listen and explore. The concept of neophyte expertise has long been important to me: the neophyte has no personal arrogance and is able to listen in a different way than the expert... and is willing to listen to more viewpoints.

The article also quotes my absolutely favorite marketing book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. I'll put together another post on this book sometime.... a profoundly simple way of thinking about communication in marketing and education.

click to see full imageMy brother, Jonathan, and I are playing live on November 16, 2007, 7:00 - 9:00 PM, at PachaMama's Organic Cafe in Auburn, California! We've been playing together every week at our church for the last two years, and of course off and on for 25 years, and if I do say so, I think we're sounding quite good. Click the image to the left for the flyer, and here's a printable black and white one. It's free and the kids will be comfortable in the relaxed environment.

Jon plays a keyboard with quite a range of tambral possibilities (lots of cool instruments) and I play violin, probably in a way you've never heard before. Similar to many things in my life, I always want to be unique, and my playing strays quite far from the typical classical mold.

We play our own combination of ethnic music including Irish fiddling and Bluegrass, mixed with Modern Jazz (lots of Pat Metheny - youtube example here and another here ), Jazz (including the occasionally bebop standard), and Newage with luscious synthesizer orchestrations from Jon's keyboard. I wish we had a recent recording I could post... but we'll solve that soon...

Perhaps the strangest thing about my playing is that I don't strive for that "classical" ideal violin sound. Some songs require a raspy blues voice, often I lose the vibrato, and some notes need to fade away into a wispy nothingness. I keep a groove with non-tonal "chops", which make the violin sound like a snare drum. And if the phrase requires it, I can make the instrument sound like a Jimmy Hendrix fed-back electric guitar. (All acoustic, no electronic manipulation needed.) But, all the while, this is within the overall expression that is very accessible... not avant-garde at all.

If you're local to Auburn, I hope to see you there!

See my Squiggle drawings under the Squiggle item in the Navigation Bar to the right....

Are they art? Are they serious? Are they doodles? What do you think? What do you see in them? Everyone sees something!

Let me know! Comment below!

Manipulative Interactivity is a method of User Interface Design that is characterized by:
• Non-modal interactions (described below)
• Dynamicism
• Presenting data in a graphical or image-based form as the primary interaction method
• Use of sliders and handles to change the on-screen view without requiring keyboard control
• Ideal for touchscreen or tablet-based input devices
• Assumes that numerical data is not the "native format" for human understanding
 
Manipulative Interactivity (MI) focuses on three interaction patterns:
• Data entry - the ability to get data into the system
• Search - the effort spent in finding the data you are interested in
• View - the ability to absorb the data in the format you want
 
So much computer/human interaction is around navigation/search and data entry, that improving the context of these two areas alone will increase user satisfaction, decrease time spent, and result in more accurate data. View is the more complex and difficult of the three patterns to implement, and I’ll take that up in a future post.
 
Data Entry and Save
In a simple form, MI asks that every data input field have knowledge of valid values, and an immediate, non-modal interaction model that communicates violation of these values.

Modality is evil – sometimes necessary, but always evil. A modal dialog is one that prevents a user for do anything until it is addressed. And it always breaks a user's flow and thought process. The worst example: the would-you-like-to-replace dialog. I want to replace 98.6% of the time, but the dialog presents itself every time! However, the programmer’s law is equally valid: never destroy the user’s data unless given explicit permission. So, the solution? Always save a backup file, or two or ten, and provide an easy interface to go back, in order to handle that other 1.4% of the time. Currently, I have to train myself to name files with version numbers, and many other in-human processes, to achieve what an auto-backup system would make seamless. Just let me get on with my work.

I'll discuss data input fields in another post, because there are just so many better ways to represent data on-screen than the way we've been doing it!

Search
MI treats data navigation from multiple levels. For example, human interaction for navigation includes the "known path", the "typical path", the "known but rarely used path" and the "unknown path". For a road mapping program, this means that the "known path", requires very little detail: the user can represent the goal of driving to church in very little detail and this sparse detail is what the user needs and expects. The "typical path", also requires little detail, but perhaps has extra detail around the end point, such as extra information about possible parking places. The "known but rarely used path" is for an acquaintance's house that the driver has been to before, but it was about a year ago, and the major turns and certain reminders are needed. Perhaps the distances between each turn become superfluous data. The "unknown path" requires as much detail as possible, whether a turn is the first left or the second left, how many blocks to go and look for what physical landmark, etc.
 
All computer interactions should represented in the same way as this example. If you communicated to your "smart car" that you wanted to go to church, you would be frustrated by an interaction model that requires you to look at and interact with the level of detail in the "unknown path." Instead, the interaction should be restricted to the "variables", such as whether you need to get there early to speak with the church clerk before the service. The "knowns" should be minimized, but not eliminated, from view.
 
Interacting with large complex data models has the same problems. A user shouldn't have to search through records for every customer with a name of "Smith", if the system already knows that "Jane Smith" had an appointment today. Nor should it make it impossible to get to the other Smiths, but it should attempt to reduce the required interaction. Or, if the mapping program has knowledge of both Washington, Utah, and Washington, DC, but the user lives in Washington, DC, then the system can assume that "Washington" means DC 99.999% of the time, and the little town in Utah is almost completely ignored.

View
The most complicated, and potentially most important concept, will need to wait for a future post.

I’m of the opinion that much of the present human-computer interaction has problems. Too often, software makes our jobs harder, and the problem is especially prevalent in repetitive business processes. Whose jobs? Knowledge workers with expertise, using computers for a significant portion of the day: individuals that get paid for productive thought: thought that is not easily replaceable by technology.

We get paid to think: to come to conclusions and put forward ideas to solve problems. So we need software that helps us to spend time thinking: not software that increases our busywork. We all have paperwork: the software should constantly reduce the effort to accomplish the paperwork, and free us to see valuable relationships that would otherwise be invisible in the mounds of paperwork.

Insight. We need it, and software should help us get it. Why do Word processors increase the amount of time we spend doing layout, when most of us really need to increase the power of our language and the impact of our ideas? Call me a dreamer, but I want a Word processor that can tell me whether my ideas follow logically, and how those ideas relate to the rest of the world’s view on the topic! Not what font I should be using.

So, for years I’ve been designing software from the view of neither the programmer nor the graphic designer (although I do plenty of both!) but from the view of information design, and now information is manipulated. I call it “manipulative interactivity.” And I’ll explain it in my next post.

Usually, I'm the one asking questions and doing lots of listening, because I'm much more interested in what other people think than what I think. I already think too much about my own little thoughts. Sometimes I go to a gathering and see if I can listen the whole evening, and never say anything about myelf. Not very Silicon Valley, I know.

But this blog, for once, starts with my ideas, and then maybe there will be feedback from them, pro and con. I've got ideas about many disciplines, and sometimes I get the feeling that people respect some of them. At least they are polite enough to follow my lead occasionally.

I've started companies, schools, organization. I've often been the "number 2" at a start-up: a spot that keeps me out of the limelight and arrows, but with freedom to have a large influence. I like that kind of freedom better than the number 1 spot: I know because I've been there too and have the scars to show for it.

So, I researched and discovered the amazing SquareSpace as a Blog Provider, and I've designed my site, and this is my first post.

Hopefully you are still reading, and will give me many opportunities to listen when I meet you.