Month: March 2013

Obviously all my Friday Reading posts are good but this one is extra good for religious reasons i.e. a day off work. As well as the fact this Friday is a bank holiday it is also two weeks since I did a Friday Reading post due to a pesky bout of illness so it really will be extra good. This weeks roundup features Bruce Sterling, government innovation, Edward Tufte, data darwinism, spying on employees, decision making psychology, Douglas Rushkoff and the crushing reality of following your dreams. Enjoy.

“Disrupters don’t just play and experiment. They kill”

And then there’s this empty pretense that these innovations make the world better. This is a dangerous word, like, ‘If we’re not making the world better, then why are we doing this at all?’. Now, I don’t want to claim that this attitude is hypocritical, because when you say a thing like that at South By – ‘Oh, we’re here to make the world better’ – you haven’t even reached the level of hypocrisy. You’re stuck at the level of childish naivety.

In depth: government support for innovation must be less timid

When Jaggeree’s Christopher Thorpe applied for funding through an additive manufacturing programme, he found that filling out the forms was more hassle than just working on a prototype and releasing it on Kickstarter. He said: “R&D is about finding out what you don’t know, testing hypotheses. The grant forms suggested you had to know all the answers up front and be able to cost the work. I’ve written successful scientific research grants before and I’ve never seen anything like it. We just gave up on them.”

Edward Tufte: The AdAgeStat Q&A

AdAgeStat: Can visualizations make it easier for journalists/pundits/advertisers, etc. to “lie with numbers?”

Mr. Tufte: No, lying comes from the producer of the content, not the mode of production. Also highly produced visualizations look like marketing, movie trailers, and video games and so have little inherent credibility for already skeptical viewers, who have learned by their bruising experiences in the marketplace about the discrepancy between ads and reality

Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work

At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?

You Won’t Believe How Adorable This Kitty Is! Click for More!

“Check out these kitties! :-)” read emails featuring the photo of a Turkish Angora cat with a purple mohawk, sent to nearly two million cubicle dwellers so far. It includes an attachment or link promising more feline photos. Those who click get a surprise: stern warnings from their tech departments.

In the wild: Rory Sutherland

The problem we all face is “The physical fallacy”. All of us, even those the social sciences, have an innate bias where we are happier fixing problems with stuff, rather than with psychological solutions – building faster trains rather than putting wifi on existing trains, to use my oft cited example. But as Benjamin Franklin (no mean decision scientist himself) remarked “There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do. The result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.”

For Douglas Rushkoff the future is now — and that’s the problem

I have been doing talks at high schools and colleges about Facebook, and over the past few months when I talk to them about Facebook, the vast majority says it’s not where they put their attention now. I’ve asked for a show of hands three or four times now, and the majority say that Facebook is for older people – that it’s “too slow” and too “permanent.”

Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life

Before you get started, though, you need to find the one interest or activity that truly fulfills you in ways nothing else can. Then, really immerse yourself in it for a few fleeting moments after an exhausting 10-hour day at a desk job and an excruciating 65-minute commute home. During nights when all you really want to do is lie down and shut your eyes for a few precious hours before you have to drag yourself out of bed for work the next morning, or on weekends when your friends want to hang out and you’re dying to just lie on your couch and watch TV because you’re too fatigued to even think straight—these are the times when you need to do what you enjoy most in life.

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Hello Friday you weekend cuddling, third best day of the week. Another week draws to a close so let’s have a look back at some things I read on the Internet this week. Last week I mentioned how my Twitter favourites i.e. how I capture the vast majority of the things I read, show an interesting pattern around my main interests at the time. There is still a clear skew recently to all things ‘design’. I am in no way a designer but I am fascinated by the science and craft of it. There were some cracking articles on the subject this week that made my brain hurt. An interesting debate around No UI, UX behind the firewall (a subject close to my heart, as in it clogs my arteries) and a look at the importance of design on the impact of the stock price. The other things that caught my eye were APIs being dead, the constant pursuit of authenticity, innovation hypocrisy, views my own, Pixar storytelling and shrinking otter appendages.

No to No UI

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die.

UX Behind the Firewall

IT departments are not like sales and marketing teams in that they have not purchased services that would fall into the “creative” category. Therefore they are often wary of UX providers, creating a cultural clash between IT and “design.” Some from the UX world may think that this is similar to any project where developers are involved. However, in this case, the developer is firmly in charge. There will be resistance to UX providers, and more than ever the concept of UX will need to be evangelized at all levels from the board director down.

Don’t be Ugly

What makes Google’s efforts so striking is that the firm has long had a reputation for caring far more about algorithms than aesthetics. In 2009 Douglas Bowman, its top designer, quit and complained that Google’s obsession with data was preventing it from listening to its designers. In a farewell missive, he wrote that it was hard to work in a culture that insisted on testing 41 different shades of blue to determine the right colour for web links displayed in search results.

APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs

Is an app that helps you manage your Netflix queue driving meaningful new subscriptions for Netflix? Probably not. Is another Twitter client helping Twitter sell and show you ads? Definitely not. When the most important transaction for Twitter was someone putting content into the network, it made sense to allow that content from anywhere. That’s no longer important to them. This is the future of Twitter APIs.

Why are we so obsessed with the pursuit of authenticity?

Innumerable industrial products now advertise themselves as “real”, following the lead of Coke’s slogan “the Real Thing”. In 2011, even Starbucks began selling salad-based lunchboxes labelled “Real Food”. A box of Rombouts’s disposable one-cup coffee filters describes its flavour as “Original Blend . . . Medium 3 AUTHENTIC”. Even Marks & Spencer’s men’s underwear is branded “authentic”, posing the nice question of what an inauthentic pair of boxer shorts or trunks would look like.

The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley’s big talk on innovation

In fact, “innovation” is something of a magic word around here, shape-shifting to fit the speaker’s immediate needs. So long as semiconductors and coding are involved, people will staple it to anything from flying cars to the iFart app.

Views my own. Obviously.

Cultures in which diverse opinions are encouraged are more open, innovative and honest than those in which they’re censored or distanced from official policy. This is true on both a national and a corporate level: censorship in North Korea hinders political change, while free speech in the Western world empowers people to oust governments; Google’s 20% time encourages employees to pursue visions not on the company’s main agenda, while a culture of subservience in the financial sector inhibits creativity. Encouraging opinions fosters innovation, while discouraging them is at best stifling and at worst dangerous.

Never mind endangered animals – it’s the thinkers that we need to save

In those halcyon days, the entire nation would sit down with bottles of stout and plates of dripping to watch a programme in which an enthusiastically cigarette-smoking Bertrand Russell, or someone of similar super-intelligence, sat motionless in a chair and discussed for hours the finer points of philosophy in incredible detail with an equally un-televisual man. Their noses and ears full of tufts of hair, their brains crackling with mental electricity, their flappy trousers hoiked biffin-tight, and their little odd socks showing, they reassured the hoi polloi that, although they were very clever, and we needed and valued them as a society, these people were loonies.

22 Rules of Storytelling by a Pixar Storyboard Artist

9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

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Hello. It’s Friday time for me to look back though my Twitter favourites and pull out my favourites from my favourites. No real theme this week although I think my favourites on Twitter do offer a peek into my current interests and there seem to be a lot about design/ux/people sharing their working out which I find fascinating to read but not really Friday Reading type material. That being said two of the links this week are very much design related, one about how big organisations aren’t very good at it and another that looks at a horrific experience that effectively forces customers to steal your content (even though they have already bought it). The other articles can be summed up with these words TED, Track, Workplace, Secret, Innovation, Stock, Flow, Disney, Sucking. Enjoy.

Design is the easy part…

“At first glance, the solution is strategy. Get more designers higher up the food chain and involved in the creation of strategies that would guide an organisation to make better decisions. Sounds right, but the reality is different. Most places I encounter these problems have all kinds of strategies talking about how important design and the end user is to them. They all handwave the right way, but the execution doesn’t match the strategy.”

Getting ultraviolent about UltraViolet™

“A good UX can be hard to quantify, but you sure know when you are having a bad one. And over Christmas I stumbled over a really good example of a bad one.”

Inside TED: the smartest bubble in the world

“The crowd is diverse, but not exactly the kind of diversity you think of when you hear the word. There are celebrities, CEOs, politicians, engineers, designers, scientists, philosophers, artists, even royalty. And while there are attendees from around the world, TED feels very white, for lack of a better way to describe it. This observation is not simply my own: it was communicated to me, unsolicited, by a number of other TEDsters during the conference. White in that specific way you can feel white people striving for diversity.”

Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace

“Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, an employee advocacy group, says current sensing technologies don’t seem to violate employment laws. “It’s not illegal to track your own employees inside your own building,” he says, adding that the data could be helpful in improving firm and worker performance.”

The Truth Behind “Secret” Innovation At Nike, Apple, Google X

“So what’s with all the hush-hush? Culture. Employees internalize their own stories–that their work is imbued with a value worthy of secrecy, vaulting Nike into the lofty heights of philosophical (and sometimes self-important) corporate cultures alongside only Apple and Disney. When I bump into Nike coach and three-time New York City Marathon winner Alberto Salazar, in between the campus’s Olympic-size swimming pools and sky-high climbing walls, even he tells me, “This place is like Disneyland.”

How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for ‘Star Wars’

“His company maintained a database called the Holocron, named after a crystal cube powered by the Force. The real-world Holocron lists 17,000 characters in the Star Wars universe inhabiting several thousand planets over a span of more than 20,000 years. It was quite a bit for Disney to process. So Lucas also provided the company with a guide, Pablo Hidalgo. A founding member of the Star Wars Fan Boy Association, Hidalgo is now a “brand communication manager” at Lucasfilm. “The Holocron can be a little overwhelming,” says Hidalgo, who obsesses over canonical matters such as the correct spelling of Wookiee and the definitive list of individuals who met with Yoda while he was hiding in the swamps of Dagobah.”

and finally here is a link to a full book in ‘blog from’ by the brilliant Hugh MacLeod

My next book: “The Art Of Not Sucking”

“Gene­rally, the real world doesn’t go out of its way to tell you to go create something use­ful and/or mea­ning­ful. Usually, it just tells you to keep your nose down and don’t rock the boat. The fact that this could quickly des­troy your soul in the pro­cess is irre­le­vant to them.

So I’m afraid it’s you who must take the ini­tia­tive; I am equally afraid that it’s you who has to take the heat if things go terribly wrong.”

When I said finally above I meant ‘finallyish’ because here is a blatant inclusion of a link to one of my own posts from this week. Shameless.

Banking conferences are broken…

“‘Oh boohoo poor little mid management banker can’t afford to go to conferences, my heart bleeds’ Yes, yes I can imagine there is very little sympathy for me but all I want is an event that tries to bridge the worlds of new and old but also opens the door to others that may be interested.”

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Thirteen proved an unlucky number as I failed to do a Friday Reading post which must have been devastating for the 7 people that read it. My excuse was that I was at the bloody excellent conference The Story and then at the pub with a lot of excellent people who had been to The Story and some that had not. I will try and write some words about it (the conference not the pub visit) next week. As way of penance for forgetting last weeks I shall do a bumper edition this week for your reading pleasure. Enjoy it and your weekend you lovely people.

Connbox: prototyping a physical product for video presence with Google Creative Lab, 2011

“Although video phones have lived large in the public imagination, no company has made a hardware product stick in the way that audio devices have. There’s something weirdly broken about taking behaviours associated with a phone: synchronous talking, ringing or alerts when one person wants another’s attention, hanging up and picking up etc.”

Why A True 3D Desktop Would Be A Colossal Mistake

“Whether it be Windows 8 or something from Google, a true Minority Report future won’t be enabled until we can replace the keyboard with true speech recognition. This isn’t impossible, technically – but it may be so, culturally.”

The Overly Documented Life

“At night, I plug in my device and load the videos onto my computer. I try to watch a few snippets before bed, which can be a disconcerting experience. I’m learning things about myself I didn’t want to know. “

Seduced by ‘perfect’ pitch: how Auto-Tune conquered pop music

“People think they’ve heard the Auto-Tune, they’ve heard the dance hits, but you really have a great voice, too,” said Guthrie, helpfully.

“No, I got, like, bummed out when I heard that,” said Sebert, sadly. “Because I really can sing. It’s one of the few things I can do.”

Warrior starts with a shredding electrical static noise, then comes her voice, sounding like what the Guardian called “a robo squawk devoid of all emotion.”

Hail Corporate: The Increasingly Insufferable Fakery of Brands on Reddit

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. These aren’t organic accidents or real fan-to-brand interaction. It’s just fakery–there’s too much of it for that not to be the case. And what’s worse, the brands that are engaging in the stunts could easily afford to pay for the ad space on those same pages. In other words, we’re not talking about small creative marketing here–we’re talking multibillion-dollar corporations using their enormous marketing teams to overwhelm busy volunteer moderators.”

How “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” Ruled The Internet

“A second later, the eagle’s talons have latched on and the boy’s taken up off the ground; he’s dead weight. A guy in a black-and-white striped sweater rooting around in a bag nearby runs over as the boy takes flight. He’s in mid-air, and when the talons release, he’s flying for a split second before hitting the ground.”

Play by your own rules.

“At launch, both apps had their distinct moments of strength and weakness. We thought foursquare was crap, and believed the design nerds flocking to Gowalla validated our attitude. Gowalla also worked anywhere — We were the first to crowd-source a local database from scratch. foursquare only worked in a dozen cities. In short, all else equal, we believed people would use our service because of its superior craft and availability.”

Designing with context

“Context is a slippery topic that evades attempts to define it too tightly. Some definitions cover just the immediate surroundings of an interaction. But in the interwoven space-time of the web, context is no longer just about the here and now. Instead, context refers to the physical, digital, and social structures that surround the point of use.”

The 3 Pillars Of The Innovation Economy

“Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in ‘human engineering,’ your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge.”

Twenty years ago (where the hell did those two decades go) Pulp Fiction was released. For a certain generation it was a defining film and for an ailing film industry it completely changed their world in so many ways. This great article covers how on earth it was made.

Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

“Keitel invited Willis to a barbecue at his home, saying that Tarantino would be there. The superstar arrived, and, one insider insists, he wanted the leading role, Vincent Vega. But with Travolta already cast as Vega, there was only one possible part for Willis—Butch, the boxer—which Tarantino had promised to Matt Dillon, whom he’d had in mind originally for the role.”

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