Translating disruptive innovation

A new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called "Design and the Elastic Mind" opens Feb. 24th. The exhibit explores how minds have adapted to the massive, often disruptive, changes occuring in science and technology in recent decades, changes that have challenged the dimensions of "time, space, matter, and individuality," and the role design plays in translating these developments into something consumable.

I like this quote from the exhibit summary:

One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve... [The exhibit] focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use... to translate disruptive innovation.

That's such an insightful way to put it, and it's exactly correct. The measure of a designer is their ability to translate disruptive innovation. I think I'll add that to my business card.

"Jeremy: A translator of disruptive innovation."

If architects had to work like web designers

I didn't write this, but it so true.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has. I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Life goes online

Or I could just show you what I mean when I say depth is better. Check out this preview for the Encyclopedia of Life:



Now that's depth web! I'd love to see the content management system running that thing. MediaWiki blows by comparison.

Depth web versus shallow web

I've mentioned before (and will probably come back to) the idea that the web is all about depth exploration of a topic. No stand-alone topic is completely stand-alone, but rather linked to back stories and related information and virtually every side-notion imaginable. It can get really deep. Perhaps the best example of this is Wikipedia, where everything eventually ends up as a blue link to everything else. It's a seemingly endless click adventure that if pursued indefinitely will bring you back to the beginning knowing everything you could possibly know about a topic. Like I said, it's depth exploration.

That's the good web in a nutshell. Almost every web application is designed around this idea of seeing how many turtles down you can get.

Almost.

Some systems are better than others at depth treatment, but surprisingly there's at least one that doesn't even try. The opposite of depth exploration is flatland shallowness. It's called Twitter.

Twitter is instant updates in 140 characters or less of what you're doing at any given moment. You can share this log with your friends who (for some odd reason) might actually be interested in what you're doing at any given moment. Sounds kind of cool. It's totally webby in that it's broadcasting your life in real-time. It's also kind of creepy, but that's alright. It's not like voyeurism and the web haven't met before. I like it because it's challenging to continually express what you're doing in Haiku moments.

Example:
Went to Walmart. Bought a case of Dasani because local tap water tastes like pesticides. Wondering why the floor is sticky. <-123 characters

If every random thought that crosses your mind demands utterance, that's the idea behind Twitter. It's actually Twitter's saving grace. It's kind of a nifty concept keeping a log of random thoughts. Unfortunately it's also horizontal, flatland, and shallow.

The crucial feature that Twitter is lacking (Web 2.0 entrepreneurs take notice, as this is how to make a Twitter plus) is an automatic way of linking these random thoughts to other random thoughts, thereby creating a depth narrative. That's how the brain works, after all. No idea is an isolated thing. Each thought is intrinsically linked to other thoughts. Our brains automatically process information relative to previously stored information. Sticky floors instantly conjure up memories of that time you went to the movies, which is linked to that first kiss in the back row, which is linked to that trip you took with that girl you kissed, which is linked to the more mundane thought of buying Mountain Dew when you stopped to get gas, and now we're back to Dasani and water tasting like pesticides. Then we're off to explore another tangent. The whole process creates this depth story stemming from a seemingly shallow account of going to Walmart, expressed in a post of less than 140 characters.

That would be really cool, bordering on a blueprint for artificial intelligence, but we don't even have to stretch it that far. It's enough to say that if Twitter is to accurately represent the stream of consciousness of all us twits, it needs depth. Otherwise, it's just the Andy Warhol painting of Web 2.0. A bit of a novelty, but completely shallow.

Turtles maybe, but also a grain of sand

A holarchical view of the web is also...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

It's turtles all the way down — and across

I mentioned previously that the creation of the web collapsed the publishing hierarchy into a horizontal model. That's not entirely accurate. If true, that would mean that every website is on an equal footing and that there's no value ranking to websites. That's obviously not true or I'd have Google money.

Hierarchy isn't an accurate term either. Hierarchy ranks various levels in order of importance with the higher levels having more value than each lower level. That's almost true but not entirely. When looking for information on your very best friend, you know, me, is it better to go to Google and look me up, or is it better to go directly to my site? Exactly. In most cases, Google has a higher value than most other websites, but not always.

The correct term for ranking websites is never actually used to my knowledge. It was coined in 1967 by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler used the word "holon" to describe things that are simultaneously whole, while part of something else (from the Greek: holos, "whole"). He rightly pointed out that each level in a hierarchy is both a part of the larger system, and also a complete and whole thing unto itself. Applied to the web we see that every website is a part of the larger web, but also a complete system of it's own. If anyone's made that connection before, it hasn't seem to have caught on. Nevertheless, it's both correct and obvious when you think about it. Websites are holons.

Holons are organized in a holarchy. I'd say that they were ranked, but it's more an organization. Where hierarchies are strictly a ranking model, the value level isn't always as clear in holarchies. Because each individual holon is a whole system, within a whole system, and containing whole systems within it, it's not completely a top-down architecture. Depending on what you're looking for on the web, one holon might be the top level eventhough it's actually the junior of a larger holon. The holon of my site, for example, is the top level Jeremy site, though it's way down at the bottom rung of the web as a whole.

Thus the publishing hierarchy was collapsed, but not exactly into a horizontal model. Instead, it was collapsed into many, many, maybe infinite, smaller systems of ranking within a huge horizontal pool.

An old Hindu story (that has many variations):

A teacher tells his student that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When the student asks what supports the tiger, the teacher says it stands upon an elephant. When asked what supports the elephant, the teacher says it's a giant turtle. When asked what supports the giant turtle, he says: "Stop right there. It's turtles all the way down."

Feeding the machine

I have a love-hate relationship with technology.

I once worked in the dishroom of a large cafeteria serving hundreds of the rudest people imaginable. As they left, they would sling their trays in through a window and my job was to [get covered in slop] stack the trays and load them onto the conveyor belt of this large silver cleaning machine. No matter how many trays I stacked and loaded there were always more coming. Stack. Load. Stack. Load. Every day the same thing. Feed the machine. Before long I couldn't tell where the machine left off and I began.

Some devices were built to make our lives easier. They serve us. They're an accessory. This monstrous steam tray cleaner wasn't one of those devices. It was large, clearly in charge, and hungry. I was but a cog in the machine feeding it endlessly. To pass the time I even took to chanting in my head: "Feed the machine. Feed the machine. Feed the machine." I was a module — the human component of a machine designed for the greater goal of clean dishes.

And today?

Today I'm partly a software coder working on Web 2.0 applications. This came about because of an early love of print, old manuscripts, and the power of the written word. I learned a long time ago how to design for and run printing presses, but when the web hit the world I was the first in my little circle of friends take an awestruck gasp. It was amazing how comparatively inexpensive you can put any strange notion you had out there. In the early days, the web was just a digital version of print, a top-down publishing scheme but nonetheless amazing, and truly revolutionary.

Web 2.0 is the natural evolution of that idea. It is the same concept that any crazy idea can be put out there, but now in critical mass. The technology that coders have assembled has reduced the complexity of publishing and collapsed the hierarchy into a horizontal model. That was the idea behind Web 1.0, but it has only just come about in any real sense. Now every crazy idea that is put out there is tagged to other crazy ideas. Links evolved from hyperlinked documents to hyperlinked everything, up to and including people. No crazy idea is a singular phenomena, it is now a part of the collective of a bigger crazy.

That's the love. In all this madness, we are building something completely new. It's something the world has never seen before in any period of history. Unless the Library at Alexandria had some system I'm not aware of for user-generated content that automatically linked the content to everything else related, including the librarians themselves, we have stumbled upon something that is the envy of philosophers, mystics, and Kings alike — no matter what the age. This machine is being constructed by everyone, not just the programmers. You, I, my seventy-something-year-old grandmother, we're building the largest human endeavor ever constructed.

In the Wired article "We Are the Web", Kevin Kelly writes:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

It doesn't even matter if people read this crap we post. We are programming the machine itself. It's learning from it's fathers and mothers, ourselves. We are here. We are giving birth to this machine. It's exciting times because when they look back, for good or ill, it all starts right now.

That's the love. It's also what scares the hell out of me.

Maybe it's a narcissistic/nostalgic yearning to remain at the top of the food chain, or a struggle to hold fast to the distinction of a boundary between man and machine. Maybe it's that I fancy myself an artist as well as a programmer and as such I'm duty bound to promote the human condition. Or maybe it's just flashback nightmares of loading trays into the Big Silver Machine. Whatever it is, I cringe at the thought of this massive machine that is more than any of us, ourselves. As father to it, the same as any of you, I wonder if I'm not one of those deadbeat dads that marvel at the birthing but want to skip town on eighteen years committed serving the creation.

One thing is clear. We can rage against the machine all we want. At some point, however, we have to step out of denial and realize the machine is now us. Whatever line there was is blurred.

You can't profile a prophet

I figured that if I'm going to go around saying that I know a thing or two about web design, I can't really get away with a minimalistic profile. So I set out to create a unique MySpace design that I can call my own. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and update my personal site as well.

Personal site. MySpace. Both are all about identity. So I got to thinking about identity in general and how one defines it. I came up blank. I can no more say what it is that makes me me than I can say what it is that makes you you. Heck if I know who I am. So I scrapped that line of thought.

I finally ended up thinking about identity like people do today, as records in a database, as a percentage chance that we'll fit some mold. Much of who we are is defined by statistics. I imagined going to a club and getting scanned, and all that information being right there on the computer screen. The bouncer's trying to decide whether to let me in. You know, Future Shock. The design also plays with today's ideas of privacy and the conflict between creating a personal site and trying to remain a private person.



The hand was a gimme. What's more personal than a hand? I was orginally going to go with just a fingerprint, but changed my mind after I put my hand through the scanner (the hand and face were shot separately). The lines on a hand are perfect for the metaphor. Fingerprints are truly unique because there are no two alike. But most of how people are identified has nothing to do with uniqueness. It's all about educated guesses. Predictions made on assumptions. In short, it's a lot like palmistry. It looks personal, but really it's nothing more than demographics. You've got a nice Heart Line there Jeremy. We'll put you on the A-list.

Fingerprints never change, and they've been there since birth. I like these "Life Etchings" better because you earn them.

When you get right down to it, profiles are a categorization of people. People that are truly unique (not saying I am one of them, of course) can't be profiled because they can't be categorized. You can't profile a prophet.