Books

Science fiction + science fact

Michael Abrash, head of Valve Software’s augmented reality efforts, [talks about why he’s joining Oculus](http://www.oculusvr.com/blog/introducing-michael-abrash-oculus-chief-scientist). It’s interesting how he focuses on the imagined experience from the books as much as the technology, which meanwhile proceeds along its own path. Blending the two is a powerful combination.

> Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime. Around the same time, I saw the first leaked alpha version of Doom…

> Fast-forward fourteen years…

> Then two things happen at about the same time. On one path, Palmer develops his first VR prototype, John and Palmer Luckey connect, Oculus forms and its Kickstarter is wildly successful, DK1 ships, and John becomes Oculus CTO. Meanwhile, I read Ready Player One, strongly recommend it to several members of the AR group, and we come to the conclusion that VR is potentially more interesting than we thought, and far more tractable than AR.

The Winston Primer

I’ve been rereading [The Diamond Age](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age) and understanding a lot more about the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” which plays a major role. So it was awesome to see that [some Pixar veterans have started to create something very similar for the iPad](http://www.fastcompany.com/3015973/innovation-agents/pixar-vets-unveil-a-genre-busting-ipad-talk-show-that-talks-back)…right down to the [ractors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Failure_of_artificial_intelligence):

> Speech engineers interpret the data daily, and alert writers to fresh answers. In one Fireside Chat Winston asks, “What is your favorite ball?” The staff came up with all the ball types they could think of, but in testing the app several kids replied “gumball.” Since that was not in the lineup, the writers concocted a quip to respond to “gumball” and added it to the database…

> So far, more than 3,000 lines have been recorded. The ToyTalk team expects to add fresh material to the app every week. And there’s also a full-time voice actor on staff to record the dialogue.

The rise of everyday writing

Something easily forgotten but remarkable when noticed–[we write more as a society today than ever before](http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/how-successful-networks-nurture-good-ideas/all/). An excerpt from [Clive Thompson’s new book](http://smarterthanyouthink.net/):

> Every day, we collectively produce millions of books’ worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email and social media — the equivalent of 36 million books.* (The entire US Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around 23 million books.)

> And what makes this explosion truly remarkable is what came before: comparatively little. Before the Internet, most people rarely wrote for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college.

Flipboard: the book

The designer of Flipboard for iPhone [had a book printed of all the intermediate designs he created](http://craigmod.com/journal/digital_physical/), along with Git comments and photos from the launch party.

What a cool way to celebrate the design process! [Via Kevin Kelly](https://plus.google.com/116416314233992548280/posts/NgsVt17BFVz).

Notes from What Technology Wants

[Kevin Kelly’s long-awaited treatise on technology](http://www.kk.org/books/what-technology-wants.php) explores it as if it were sentient and willful. Thinking about what technology “wants”–what it is driving toward and which paths it prefers–is both a good way to understand why technologies work the way we do and to try to design better ones.

My high-level takeaways, roughly reflected in the order of the notes below:

* Technology is part of evolution, not separate
* It has a direction, influenced by the material nature of the universe
* We can’t realistically go back now; we’re too intertwined with technology
* Our best course of action is to adapt ourselves, choosing which technologies to embrace carefully and preparing our mindset for a world of increasing technology, diversity, and choice
* Characteristics of better technologies:
* Open – you can build upon and learn from how past technologies work
* Good relationships – a positive relationship with technology mirrors many aspects of a good relationship with a person
* Artistic – over time, any technology becomes “useless” and is used as art (think candles, fountain pens, sailboats)
* Enable creativity – Mozart without the piano would have been a lost talent

His summary, at the very end of the book:

> What I hope I have shown in this book is that a single thread of self-generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Life is less a miracle than a necessity for matter and energy. The technium is less an adversary to life than its extension. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made. – 5370

## Notes

### WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY?

His perspective on technology has shifted from individual bits to the overall direction:

> Our confusion over technology usually starts with a very specific concern: Should we allow human cloning? Is constant texting making our kids dumb? Do we want automobiles to park themselves? But as my quest evolved, I realized that if we want to find satisfying answers to those questions, we first need to consider technology as a whole. Only by listening to technology’s story, divining its tendencies and biases, and tracing its current direction can we hope to solve our personal puzzles. – 127

As technologies became smaller, their true nature became clear:

> However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. And as technology was unveiled from its shroud of atoms, we could see that at its core, it, too, is about ideas and information. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information. – 200

Defining the “technium”:

> I’ve somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the technium. The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more technology invention, and more self-enhancing connections. – 236

> The essential quality of the technium [is] this idea of a self-reinforcing system of creation. – 236

> The technium is now as great a force in our world as nature, and our response to the technium should be similar to our response to nature. We can’t demand that technology obey us any more than we can demand that life obey us. – 319

### TECHNOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

DNA may be the “original” technology:

> We can seek alternative “acorn” molecules as a way to rerun this unfolding to see if something else besides DNA could generate similar diversity, reliability, and evolvability. – 1703

> In the case of self-organizing life, we might want to be particularly hesitant to generalize about alternatives since everything we can say about it is based on a sample size (so far) of exactly one, here on Earth. But chemistry is chemistry, everywhere in the universe. – 1713

> So far, all evidence points to DNA as the “perfect” molecule. For even though clever minds like ours may invent a new life base, finding a life base that can create itself is an entirely higher order. – 1725

> It is not enough to find a molecule that can self-replicate and generate ever-larger mounds of increasing complexity. There may indeed be multiple amazing chemical nuclei capable of that. Rather, the challenge is finding one that does all that and can make itself, too. – 1742

A sobering thought…so should I exercise or not?

> While a mouse’s heart and lungs beat rapidly compared to an elephant’s, both mouse and elephant count the same number of beats and breaths per life. It is as if mammals are assigned 1.5 billion heartbeats and told to use them as they like. – 1658

I’ve always wondered why people in hostile climates seemed to “develop” faster. Kelly’s theory is that it forced them to develop more technologies:

> While Sapiens’ innovation allowed them to prosper in many new climates, the cold and its unique ecology especially drove innovation. More complex “technological units” are needed (or have been invented) by historical hunter-gatherer tribes the higher the latitude of their homes. – 392

The first population explosion happened about 50,000 years ago, likely due to the invention of language, one of our strongest technologies:

> A number of scientists (including Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, and William Calvin, among many others) think that the “something” that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. – 407

> The chief advantage of language is not communication but autogeneration. Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself; a magic mirror that reveals to the mind what the mind thinks; a handle that turns a mind into a tool. – 418

> Until we tame the mind with an organization tool capable of communicating to itself, we have stray thoughts without a narrative. – 422

> It turns out that the bounty of nature, though vast, does not hold all possibilities. The mind does, but it had not yet been fully unleashed. Only when the mind, liberated by language and enabled by the technium, transcended the constraints of nature 50,000 years ago did greater realms of possibility open up. – 581

> A world without technology had enough to sustain survival but not enough to transcend it. – 582

Does information represent our best fight against entropy?

> Exotropy is another word for the technical term negentropy, or negative entropy. – 965

> The best we can say is that exotropy resembles, but is not equivalent to, information and that it entails self-organization. – 973

> Information is a signal of bits that makes a difference. – 978

Reminders of [_God’s Debris_](http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=197):

> It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that in the initial femtoseconds of creation there was only one thing in the universe, one superdense power that ruled all, and this solitary power expanded and cooled into thousands of variations of itself. The history of the cosmos thus proceeds from unity to diversity. – 930

We are all star children:

> As we age we are really a river of cosmically old atoms. The carbons in our bodies were produced in the dust of a star. The bulk of matter in our hands, skin, eyes, and hearts was made near the beginning of time, billions of years ago. We are much older than we look. – 890

### THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY

Technology is part of evolution, not separate.

> When we look at technology, we tend to see pipes and blinking lights. But in the long-term view, technology is simply the further evolution of evolution. The technium is a continuation of a four-billion-year-old force that pursues more ability to evolve. – 5175

And it’s evolving us along with it:

> Today, according to research on the mutations in our DNA, our genes are evolving 100 times faster than in preagricultural times. – 5196

> As the technium expands, it accelerates the rate of evolution first begun with life, so that it now evolves the idea of change itself. This is more than simply the most powerful force in the world; the evolution of evolution is the most powerful force in the universe. – 5204

There are three main forces that propel evolution:

> Charted, the tripod of evolution might look like this: – 1849

Within a given environment, evolutionary forces will guide common solutions:

> “When similar forces converge, similar results emerge. Evolution is remarkably reproducible,” – geneticist Sean Carroll. – 1562

> What, then, guides this return to the improbable? If the same protein, or “contingent” form, is evolved twice, it is obvious that every step of the way cannot be random. The prime guidance for these parallel journeys is their common environment. – 1623

> Evolution is driven toward certain recurring and inevitable forms by two pressures: 1. The negative constraints cast by the laws of geometry and physics, which limit the scope of life’s possibilities.

2. The positive constraints produced by the self-organizing complexity of interlinked genes and metabolic pathways, which generate a few repeating new possibilities. These two dynamics create a push in evolution that gives it a direction. – 1639

> The direction of technological development is the same anytime it happens. – 2277

While technology will not lead us inescapably to utopia, it will continuously lead us to more possibilities, and the potential to choose better paths:

> It is easy to mistake progressivism as utopianism because where else does increasing and everlasting improvement point to except utopia? Sadly, that confuses a direction with a destination. The future as un-soiled technological perfection is unattainable; the future as a territory of continuously expanding possibilities is not only attainable but also exactly the road we are on now. – 1512

### TECHNOLOGY, CITIES, AND OPPORTUNITY

Slums might be an essential part of development, not a blight on otherwise perfect planning:

> Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. – 1233

> In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5 percent, but 94 percent of their kids were literate. – 1254

Why do people flee what seems an idyllic rural lifestyle to huddle in the slums?

> If you ask them why they come, it’s almost always the same answer, the same answer given by the Bedouin and slum dwellers of Mumbai. They come for opportunities. They could stay where they are, as the Amish choose to do. The young men and women could remain in the villages and adopt the satisfying rhythms of agriculture and small-town craft that their parents followed…

> But the options aren’t equal. People of the world increasingly have TV and radio and trips into town to see movies, and they know what is possible. The freedom in a city makes their village seem a prison. So they choose—very willingly, very eagerly—to run to the city. – 1269

Perhaps why “science” as a topic is unpopular among individuals and in difficult circumstances:

> The benefits of science are neither apparent nor immediate for individuals. Science requires a certain density of leisured population willing to share and support failures to thrive. – 1367

One of Kelly’s technology scenarios envisions a falling population, which would require a non-growth economy:

> If every year there are fewer people as my potential audience or my potential customers, I have to create things for a different reason than growth in audience or customers. A nongrowth economy is hard to imagine. But stranger things have happened. – 1459

### THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF REJECTING TECHNOLOGY

Kevin started out as, if not a technophobe, at least a tech-avoider:

> As a teenager, I was having trouble hearing my own voice, and it seemed to me my friends’ true voices were being drowned out by the loud conversations technology was having with itself. – 63

And years later, remnants of that attitude remain:

> I see my friends leashed to their vibrating handhelds, but I continue to keep the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length so that I can more easily remember who I am. – 108

In our current mindset (with its low emotional quotient) it would take technology to disprove technology’s value:

> The way to reveal the full costs of technology and deflate its hype is with better information tools and processes. – 3200

Considering new technologies deeply and carefully, with a process in place to choose from among them, is one way to avoid mistakenly adopting harmful ones. Kelly spent significant time among the Amish, and he noticed that they do this:

> In contemporary society our default is set to say yes to new things, and in Old Order Amish communities the default is set to “not yet.” When new things come around, the Old Order Amish automatically react by ignoring them. – 3225

Yet it would be hard to impose that model on the entire world.

> To fulfill the Amish model we’d have to get better at relinquishing as a group—which is very difficult for a pluralistic society. Social relinquishing relies on mutual support. I have not seen any evidence of that happening outside of Amish communities, but it would be a telling sign if it did appear. – 3360

Even the Amish could not exist without the context of the outside world adopting many technologies.

> In short, the Amish depend on the outside world for the way they currently live. Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice—but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it. – 3441

> As far as I can tell, there are no other ongoing large-scale communities based outside North America that have built a lifestyle around minimal technology. That’s because outside technological America the idea seems crazy. This opt-out option makes sense only when there is something to opt out of. – 3447

> Such elegant rejection can only exist in, and because of, a modern technium. – 3453

Simplicity is one of the strongest pulls of anti-technological lifestyles. But moderation in all things:

> I have observed that simplicity’s fullest potential requires that one consider minimalism one phase of many (even if a recurring phase, as is meditation or the Sabbath). – 3475

Utoptian dreams depend on a false belief in fixed human nature:

> It is only possible to optimize human satisfaction if you believe human nature is fixed. – 3487

> We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today. – 3512

So embracing that change may be our best way of optimizing happiness:

> Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. – 3547

Even to find our own simplicity:

> To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. – 3559

> For instance, the number of technologies to choose from so far exceeds our capacity to use them all that these days we define ourselves more by the technologies we don’t use than by those we do. – 3568

> It is true that too many choices may induce regret, but “no choice” is a far worse option. Civilization is a steady migration away from “no choice.” – 4279

Is it possible to truly reject any technology completely–even one that seems harmful or outdated?

> I recently examined all the cases of large-scale technology prohibitions that I could find in the last 1,000 years. – 3593

> I am not counting technologies that are ignored, but only ones that are deliberately relinquished. I found about 40 cases that met these criteria. That is not very many cases for 1,000 years. – 3595

### SYMBIOTIC WITH TECHNOLOGY

The discussions about accepting or rejecting technology, as a society, are at this point moot:

> We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology—every last knife and spear—were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology. – 590

We treat technology as something separate from us, that acts if at all on our bodies. But it’s perhaps better thought of as a mental augmentation:

> If technology is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes but of our minds. Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas. – 684

> The technium—the organism of ideas – 685

Progress seems agonizingly slow sometimes, but even a 1% improvement gradually changes the world:

> When measured against the large-scale imperfections of our society, 1 percent better seems trivial. Yet this tiny, slim, shy discrepancy generates progress when compounded by the ratchet of culture. Over time a few percent “not much better” accumulates into civilization. – 1084

There’s no going back; we can’t and we won’t:

> We don’t go on as we are. We address the problems of tomorrow not with today’s tools but with the tools of tomorrow. This is what we call progress. – 1510

Information technology, starting with printing, has completely transformed our experience of the world:

> Libraries, catalogs, cross-referencing, dictionaries, concordances, and the publishing of minute observations all blossomed, producing a new level of informational ubiquity—to the extent that today we don’t even notice that printing covers our visual landscape. – 743

> The invention of language marks the last major transformation in the natural world and also the first transformation in the manufactured world. – 758

### OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY

Mostly, we are users of technology, and intelligent ones who can prepare for its inevitable arrival.

> Our choice, and it is significant, is to prepare for the gift—and the problems it will also bring. We can choose to get better at anticipating these inevitable surges. We can choose to educate ourselves and our children to become intelligently literate and wise in their employment. And we can choose to modify our legal and political and economic assumptions to meet the ordained trajectories ahead. But we cannot escape from them. – 2582

Our current choices can shape the near term form of the technium.

> Like personality, technology is shaped by a triad of forces. The primary driver is preordained development—what technology wants. The second driver is the influence of technological history, the gravity of the past, as in the way the size of a horse’s yoke determines the size of a space rocket. The third force is society’s collective free will in shaping the technium, or our choices. – 2681

> In the view of cultural historian David Apter, “Human freedom actually exists within the limits set by the historical process. While not everything is possible, there is much that can still be chosen.” – 2693

> If we can discern the large outlines of persistent forces, we can better educate our children in the appropriate skills and literacies need for thriving in that world. We can shift the defaults in our laws and public institutions to reflect that coming reality. If, for instance, we realize that everyone’s full DNA will be sequenced from birth or before (that is inevitable), then instructing everyone in genetic literacy becomes essential. – 2747

Technology is a separate force, outside our full control.

> The vortex of the technium has grown its own agenda, its own imperative, its own direction. It is no longer under the full control and mastery of its parent and creator, humanity. – 2766

> Humans are both master and slave to the technium, and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role. – 2782

Rejecting technology is no longer a real option.

> But our concern should not be about whether to embrace it. We are beyond embrace; we are already symbiotic with it. – 2783

> The conflict that the technium triggers in our hearts is due to our refusal to accept our nature—the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. We are self-made humans, our own best invention. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred. – 2787

Although some people are trying:

> In 2006 Derrick Jensen penned a 1,500-page treatise on how and why to topple technological civilization, with hands-on suggestions of the ideal places to start—for instance, power and gas lines and the information infrastructure. – 2960

Visualizing something is the first step toward accomplishing it. Yet really visualizing an alternative to civilization (a technology) has been impossible:

> The great difficulty of the anticivilizationists is that a sustainable, desirable alternative to civilization is unimaginable. We cannot picture it. We cannot see how it would be a place we’d like to move to. We can’t imagine how this primitive arrangement of stone and fur would satisfy each of our individual talents. And because we cannot imagine it, it will never happen, because nothing has ever been created without being imagined first. – 3108

Technology allows us the potential of transcending natural limitations.

> “We trust in nature, but we hope in technology,” says Brian Arthur. – 2789

But utopian dreams rarely turn out that way.

> David Nye, a historian of technology, adds to the list of inventions envisioned as abolishing war once and for all and ushering in universal peace the torpedo, the hot-air balloon, poison gas, land mines, missiles, and laser guns. Nye says, “Each new form of communication, from the telegraph and telephone to radio, film, television and the internet, has been heralded as the guarantor of free speech and the unfettered movement of ideas.” – 2811

> “Problems are the answers to solutions,” says Brian Arthur. – 2819

> As techno-critic Theodore Roszak says, “How much of what we readily identify as ‘progress’ in the urban-industrial society is really the undoing of evils inherited from the last round of technological innovation?” – 2823

Interestingly, the technium is sometimes used to convince people to work on building…the technium.

> At the same time, mass education and media train humans to shy away from low-tech manual work, to seek jobs working for the digital technium. – 2828

### WHAT IS OUR ROLE?

Our genetics might drive its mutations in a non-random way:

> In the old view, the internal (the source of mutation) created change, while the external (the environmental source of adaptation) selected or directed it; in the new view, the external (physical and chemical constraints) creates forms, while the internal (self-organization) selects or directs them. – 1804

We are the hands and feet of technology, doing the manual labor to evolve it. But the actual direction seems almost preordained, and that we are simply following a trail of breadcrumbs.

> As both parent and child of the technium—evolution accelerated—we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained becoming. “I seem to be a verb,” the inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said. – 1937

> If discovery is a lottery, the greatest discoverers buy lots of tickets. – 2001

> Once an idea is “in the air” its many manifestations are inevitable. You just need a sufficient number of smart, prolific people to start catching them. – 2104

> Gladwell observes, “The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.” – 2106

> So the greatest iconic genius of the human race is able to leap ahead of the inevitable by maybe 10 years. For the rest of humanity, the inevitable happens on schedule. – 2157

We develop art and culture to prepare the mindsets of the explorers:

> In addition to instruments and tools, a discovery needs the proper beliefs, expectations, vocabulary, explanation, know-how, resources, funds, and appreciation to appear. – 2303

Marshall McLuhan had a more provocative way of putting this:

> Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth. – [Marshal McLuhan](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan)

### CAN WE ACCELERATE TECHNOLOGY?

The idea of “leapfrogging” stages of technology is mostly a dream. In reality, some technologies can appear ahead of schedule, but the older ones are still necessary and are dragged along with them.

> The fact that billions of poor in the developing world have purchased cheap cell phones and bypassed long waits for industrial-age landline telephones has given hope that other technologies could also leapfrog into the future. But my close examination of cell-phone adoption in China, India, Brazil, and Africa shows that the boom in cell phones around the world is accompanied by a parallel boom in copper-wire landlines. Cell phones don’t cancel landlines. Instead, where cell phones go, copper follows. Cell phones train newly educated customers to need higher-bandwidth internet connections and higher-quality voice connections, which then follow in copper wires. – 2317

And even “high-tech” is remarkably bound to boring old commodity materials.

> Cell phones, web pages, solar panels all rest upon heavy industry, and industry rests upon agriculture. – 2323

> Since these curves begin and advance independent of our awareness and do not waver very much from a straight line under enormous competition and investment pressures, their course must in some way be bound to the materials. – 2474

We can’t really see very far ahead anyway:

> In the apt phrase of futurist Paul Saffo, we often confuse a clear view of the future with a short distance. – 2876

An interesting parallel are the [tech trees](http://www.google.com/search?q=tech+tree&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=pgW9TsuhD8uWOpWX4bkB&ved=0CEQQsAQ&biw=1251&bih=777&sei=qgW9TtbJN4PMtAaEiOW1Aw) used in many simulation video games:

### DESIGNING POSITIVE TECHNOLOGIES

> The evolution of new technologies is inevitable; we can’t stop it. But the character of each technology is up to us. – 3999

Technology escapes our predictions, both for good and bad. Don’t limit how people can use your product.

> Advertisements at the beginning of the last century tried to sell hesitant consumers the newfangled telephone by stressing ways it could send messages, such as invitations, store orders, or confirmation of their safe arrival. The advertisers pitched the telephone as if it were a more convenient telegraph. None of them suggested having a conversation. – 3664

Don’t be afraid of abuse. In fact, all great technologies could be used for both good or evil.

> An invention or idea is not really tremendous unless it can be tremendously abused. – 3682

> In a letter Orville Wright wrote to his inventor friend Henry Ford, Wright recounts a story he heard from a missionary stationed in China. Wright told Ford the story for the same reason I tell it here: as a cautionary tale about speculative risks. The missionary wanted to improve the laborious way the Chinese peasants in his province harvested grain. The local farmers clipped the stalks with some kind of small hand shear. So the missionary had a scythe shipped in from America and demonstrated its superior productivity to an enthralled crowd. “The next morning, however, a delegation came to see the missionary. The scythe must be destroyed at once. What, they said, if it should fall into the hands of thieves; a whole field could be cut and carried away in a single night.” And so the scythe was banished, progress stopped, because nonusers could imagine a possible—but wholly improbable—way it could significantly harm their society. – 3729

Its open-endedness is often part of its appeal.

> Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo—a thing one plugs into—and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. – 4845

Powerful technologies will engender powerful emotions. Design for love and hate, not indifference.

> In the technium, revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand. Our biggest technological creations are like people in that way; they elicit our deepest loves and hates. – 4830

Prepare for continual attention and repair of your technologies:

> Eternal vigilance is the price of artificial complexity,” says Langdon Winner. – 3795

Although complexity isn’t always the enemy. Biological life is more complex than its atomic origins in the stars, and that’s been good to us.

> Like with a ratchet, exotropic systems rarely reverse, devolve, or become simpler. – 4121

Design “convivial” technologies:

> Convivial is a great word whose roots mean “compatible with life.” – 3977

> A convivial manifestation of a technology offers:

> * Cooperation. It promotes collaboration between people and institutions.
* Transparency. Its origins and ownership are clear. Its workings are intelligible to nonexperts. There is no asymmetrical advantage of knowledge to some of its users.
* Decentralization. Its ownership, production, and control are distributed. It is not monopolized by a professional elite.
* Flexibility. It is easy for users to modify, adapt, improve, or inspect its core. Individuals may freely choose to use it or give it up.
* Redundancy. It is not the only solution, not a monopoly, but one of several options.
* Efficiency. It minimizes impact on ecosystems. It has a high efficiency for energy and materials and is easy to reuse. – 3982

In general, design a technology that behaves similar to a healthy natural relationship.

> So the more lifelike we train our technology to be, the more convivial it becomes for us and the more sustainable the technium becomes in the long run. The more convivial a technology is, the more it aligns with its nature as the seventh kingdom of life. – 3993

> Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:

> *Increasing efficiency
* Increasing opportunity
* Increasing emergence
* Increasing complexity
* Increasing diversity
* Increasing specialization
* Increasing ubiquity
* Increasing freedom
* Increasing mutualism
* Increasing beauty
* Increasing sentience
* Increasing structure
* Increasing evolvability – 4024

Thinking of ourselves as elements of the universe puts us in an interesting position:

> Our body size is, weirdly, almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than we are, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. – 4193

Expect that the first uses of a general technology will be focused on the technology itself. Design for that!

> The internet was invented in the 1970s and offered very few benefits at first. It was primarily used by its inventors, a very small clique of professionals fluent in programming languages, as a tool to improve itself. From birth the internet was constructed in order to make talking about the idea of an internet more efficient. Likewise, the first ham radio operators primarily broadcast discussions about ham radio; the early world of CB radio was filled with talk about CB; the first blogs were about blogging; the first several years of twitterings concerned Twitter. – 4537

Technologies become art over time. Design for that even when they are new and “useful”.

> Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and “useless.” Since technology is born out of usefulness, this is a long haul. As utilitarian technologies age, they tend to become recreational. Witness sailboats, open convertible cars, fountain pens, and fireplaces. Who would have guessed anyone would burn candles when lightbulbs are so cheap? But burning candles is now a mark of luxuriant uselessness. Some of our hardest-working technology today will achieve beautiful uselessness in the future. – 4865

Are designers this rigorous in our product experiments? Not typically…

> A typical scientific discovery today will rely on facts and a falsifiable hypothesis; be tested in repeatable, controlled experiments, perhaps with placebos and double-blind controls; and be reported in a peer-reviewed journal and indexed in a library of related reports. – 5122

Design technologies that help people reach their creative potential. What if Van Gogh had been born before oil paints? Or Mozart before the piano?

What kinds of technologies are these? Perhaps the ones that let you experience an emotion or sense in a new way; that let you experience memory or sound or smell or emotions or relationships programmatically, or in new contexts or ways. The ones that let you combine your unique location, resources, and talents to do something brand new.

> How can technology make a person better? Only in this way: by providing each person with chances. A chance to excel at the unique mixture of talents he or she was born with, a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds, a chance to be different from his or her parents, a chance to create something his or her own. – 5237

I read this, again, in Gambia and Senegal and recognized the lack of opportunities and choice there.

> For most of history, the unique mix of talents, skills, insights, and experiences of each person had no outlet. If your dad was a baker, you were a baker. – 5280

Design something simple, a building block for general use, easy to modify and adapt.

> The simple invention of a wheel unleashed a hundred new ideas of what to do with it. From it issued carts, pottery wheels, prayer wheels, and gears. – 5287

### TECHNOLOGY AND DIVERSITY

Fears of a global homogenization due to technology are probably overblown. Technology celebrates diversity and helps share it globally:

> The distinctive foods, medicinal knowledge, and child-rearing practices of, say, the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon or the San Bushmen in Africa were only esoteric, local knowledge before. Their diversity constituted a difference that did not make a difference outside the tribe, because their knowledge was not connected to other human cultures. – 4304

> The places most renowned for their beauty (Venice, Kyoto, Esfahan) are those that reveal intersecting deep layers of time. Every corner carries the long history of the city embedded in it like a hologram, glimpses of which unfold as we stroll by. – 4785

I read this passage while floating down the Gambia River, thanks to many technologies including my Kindle and several transportation inventions.

> All these tools will gain new powers by sharing the universal – 4421

Even convergence of technologies seems to be a temporary state. Also, “intelligenation” is a cool word.

> All portals have become the simplest possible window: a flat screen of some size. This convergence is temporary. We are still in the early stages of computerization—or rather, intelligenation. – 4413

> We can forecast the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity. – 4431

If your technology only solves a current problem, it is likely an evolutionary dead end. If it is more general and productive, then it can lead to more.

> The problem with remedial technologies is that once their niches are filled, they lead nowhere else. A vaccine has no future if it is universally successful. In the long run, convivial technologies that open up other technologies tend to ascend to ubiquity fastest. – 4443

Even technological intelligence will likely move toward diversity rather than full unification. For instance, once Google has a strong AI, others will be even more important to balance and work with it.

> What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather, over the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible. – 5018

Technology is linked to choice; it will always diversify.

> Rather than a series of meandering lines that travel into a set future, picture these arrows of technological trends exploding outward from the present. – 5214

> The technium is an explosion of information, organization, complexity, diversity, sentience, beauty, and structure that is changing itself as it expands. – 5216

### THE TECHNO-GAP

Most technologies are not exclusive to certain people; they will just arrive at different times. And the early adopters make them possible for others to have later.

> This was simply a case, as computer scientist Marvin Minsky once put it, of the “haves and have-laters.” The haves (the early adopters) overpay for crummy early editions of technology that barely work. They purchase flaky first versions of new goods that finance cheaper and better versions for the have-laters, who will get things that work for dirt cheap not long afterward. In essence, the haves fund the evolution of technology for the have-laters. Isn’t that how it should be, that the rich fund the development of cheap technology for the poor? – 4560

Assume that everyone will have access someday soon. What will you do then?

> “If you want to worry about something, don’t worry about the folks who are currently offline. They’ll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has six billion people, and they are all e-mailing at once, when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous. That will produce unintended consequences worth worrying about.” – 4575

> We were so focused on those who don’t have plenty to eat that we missed what happens when everyone does have plenty. – 4580

Technology prefers being social and ubiquitous; it will spread itself to everyone.

> At nearly every turn, the powers of socialization—sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, and transparency—have proven to be more practical than anyone thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of mutuality is greater than we imagined. Each time we reinvent something, we’ll make it yet more mutualistic. – 4758

### BEAUTY AND LOVE IN TECHNOLOGY

> If you can honestly love a cat, which can’t give you directions to a stranger’s house, why can’t you love the web? – 4859

Do we love the human form specifically, or the fact that it is the most evolved we’ve seen?

> Humans are the most complex, highly evolved organisms we have encountered, so we fixate on imitations of this form (quite naturally), but our technophilia is fundamentally not for anthropy, but for anything highly evolved. Humanity’s most advanced technology will soon leave imitation behind and create obviously nonhuman intelligences and obviously nonhuman robots and obviously non-Earthlike life, and all these will radiate an evolved attractiveness that will dazzle us. As it does, we’ll find it easier to admit that we have an affinity for it. – 4875

### TECHNOLOGY’S INTELLIGENCE

I haven’t heard of many natural (non-learned) human-animal interactions, but this one is fascinating:

> The honeyguide bird in Kenya lures humans to wild bee nests so that the birds can feast on the remaining bee brood after the humans remove the honey; sometimes, according to ornithologists, the honeyguide will “deceive” the hunters about the actual distance to a deep forest nest if it is more than two kilometers away, so as not to discourage them. – 4903

Our best chance for communicating in depth with another intelligent species is likely to create it ourselves.

> Someday we might meet other intelligences in the galaxies. But long before then we will manufacture millions of new kinds of minds on our own world. – 4998

This seems a bit overreaching however:

> What technology brings to us individually is the possibility of finding out who we are, and more important, who we might be. – 5251

TECHNOLOGY AND THE SOUL

Pursue spiritual and emotional growth alongside our technological improvements. Right now we’re not matching our emotional intelligence to our technological abilities. Reminds me of [the quote by Lhasang Tsering](http://www.artlic.com/press/kits/tibet_kit.html): “For centuries our best minds, our saints and our philosophers concentrated all their time and energy to understanding the nature of the mind. And who can say which would really matter in the end–the landing on the moon or the understanding of the mind?”.

> I asked him, “Do you think technology is making the world better or worse?” Lucas’s answer: If you watch the curve of science and everything we know, it shoots up like a rocket. We’re on this rocket and we’re going perfectly vertical into the stars. But the emotional intelligence of humankind is equally if not more important than our intellectual intelligence. We’re just as emotionally illiterate as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and the vertical are getting farther and farther apart. And as these things grow apart, there’s going to be some kind of consequence of that. I think we underestimate the strain of that gap. In the long term, the erosion of the traditional self may prove to be a larger part of the technium’s cost than its erosion of the biosphere. – 2882

We currently separate spiritual and scientific knowledge, but that may be due to our own scientific limitations.

> Currently science has no way to accept these strands of spiritual information and weave them into the current consilience, and so their truth remains “undiscovered.” Certain fringe sciences, such as ESP, are kept on the fringe because their findings, coherent in their own framework, don’t fit into the larger pattern of the known. But in time, more facts are brought into this structure of information. More important, the methods whereby knowledge is structured are themselves evolving and being restructured. – 5098

### TECHNOLOGY AND GOD

> If there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him. – 5349

An interesting theological branch:

> There is even a modern theology that postulates that God, too, changes. Without splitting too many theological hairs, this theory, called Process Theology, describes God as a process, a perfect process, if you will. – 5357

> That prime self-causation, which is not preceded but instead first makes itself before it makes either time or nothingness, is the most logical definition of God. – 5363

Does technology show us more of God?

> We can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog. The phone extends the frog’s four billion years of learning and adds the open-ended investigations of six billion human minds. – 5413

### FOLLOWUP

> Families in 39 countries, including Nepal, Haiti, Germany, Russia, and Peru, let Menzel and his delegates haul the entire contents of their homes outside into the street or yard to be photographed, inventoried, and published in [Menzel’s book](http://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Global-Family-Portrait/dp/0871564300), [called Material World](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/worldbalance/material.html). – 1133

> The only source I have found for a reliable projection of what happens on the other side of the peak of human population around 2050 is [a set of UN scenarios for World Population in 2300](http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/2004worldpop2300reportfinalc.pdf), that is, for the next 300 years. – 1410

> [In a list he drew up of possible uses for the phonograph](http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?id=617), Edison added at the end, almost as an afterthought, the idea of playing recorded music. – 3648

> [Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems, and the Human World](http://www.amazon.com/VISIONS-TECHNOLOGY-Century-Machines-Technology/dp/0684839032). Richard Rhodes, ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. In this one-volume anthology, Rhodes collects writings about technology written over the past century or so. Critics, poets, inventors, authors, artists, and ordinary citizens present some of the most quotable passages and perspectives on technology. I found all kinds of insights I had not seen elsewhere. – 5492

> [Finite and Infinite Games](http://www.amazon.com/Finite-and-Infinite-Games-ebook/dp/B004W3FM4A/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2). James Carse. New York: Free Press, 1986. This tiny book holds a universe of wisdom. Written by a theologian, you probably need to read only the first and last chapters, but that is enough. It altered my thinking about life, the universe, and everything. – 5527

> [Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthals,_Bandits_and_Farmers). Colin Tudge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. A courageously tiny book that manages to sum up the reasons for the birth of agriculture into 52 small pages. It packs in about five volumes of insight a whole library of research and then distills the essence into one beautiful essay. I wish I could write a tiny brilliant book like this. – 5552

> [The Ascent of Man](http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Man-Book-Club/dp/B000OFXN64/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0). Jacob Bronowski. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Based on the [1972 BBC-TV series of the same name](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man), this book inspired the sweep and scope of my own and provided some key concepts. Part geek, part poet, part mystic, part scientist, Bronowski was way ahead of his time. – 5560

Judging a book by its highlights

Viewing [Kindle books ranked by number of highlights](https://kindle.amazon.com/most_popular/books_by_popular_highlights_all_time) is pretty interesting. I assume the excerpt on the list page is the most highlighted passage in each, and it gives better insight into the book’s true theme and content than any “publisher’s description”.

Notes from “I’m Feeling Lucky”

I found [this book](http://www.amazon.com/Im-Feeling-Lucky-Confessions-ebook/dp/B004X7SYQI) fascinating, as it not only contains stories from the earliest days of Google, but does so from the perspective of someone in a creative role–[Doug Edwards](http://xooglers.blogspot.com/), Google’s first head of marketing and a person who helped set the tone of Google’s design and communication.

His insights are remarkably similar to what it’s like to design products there today–both the good and the bad. Fortunately, having Doug’s stories to draw on really help me understand the culture better and hopefully improve my work. I only wish I had read this book (and [his blog](http://xooglers.blogspot.com/)) 6 years ago!


*Notes and quotes* (with Kindle locations)

“Your greatest impact as an engineer comes through hiring someone who is as good as you or better,” he exhorted everyone who would listen, “because over the next year, they double your productivity. There’s nothing else you can do to double your productivity. Even if you’re a genius, that’s extremely unlikely to happen.” – 776

“That’s because marketing likes to lie,” Larry let slip. He smiled when he said it, but I sensed we were being held to account for everything engineers hated about the nonquantifiable world, with its corrupted communications and frequent flyer programs. God help anyone who offered a marketing opinion as if it were a scientific fact. – 815

“Let’s do a gap analysis,” I used to say at the Merc. “What’s the unmet need? Where’s the market opportunity? How much share can we gain?” Engineers hate that kind of thinking. If you’re an engineer with a brilliant idea, seeing it dumbed down or abandoned because it doesn’t test well is like watching a bully pull the wings off a butterfly. The right thing to do is build it regardless, to prove that you can and because building cool things is—well, you end up with cool things. – 1055

Google’s official office dress code was “You must wear clothes.” – 1620

A week later we changed the label back to “cached” and I plotted three new data points on my Google graph: Nothing was final until Larry said it was. Larry communicated directly to the people who could implement his decisions. Larry erased what he had etched in stone if the walls crumbled around him. – 1792

The madness was not without method. Not only did Larry and Sergey’s hyperbolic proposals force us to reason more tightly, but starting at the ideological antipodes exploited the full value of the intelligence in the room. After Larry or Sergey made one of their outrageous suggestions, nothing that followed would seem inconceivable. – 1945

Larry even hated the stiff black cardboard that agencies used to present creative campaigns—each concept perfectly center-mounted to convey greater gravitas. To Larry, a good idea was self-evident, even if scrawled on a wrinkled napkin in blotchy ballpoint. Ad agencies, he hinted, were full of bumbling simpletons and evil dissemblers. – 2495

“‘An order of magnitude is qualitative, not quantitative.’ When you go up by an order of magnitude, the problem is different enough that it demands different solutions. It’s discontinuous.” – 3008

If you want to make a killing trading tech stocks, find a friend in the t-shirt business between San Francisco and San Jose and ask to be alerted any time a rush order gets placed. – 3150

“Larry and Sergey had certain things they wanted worked on,” Gmail creator Paul Bucheit explained, “and there were these standing groups that were making up their own things and not doing whatever it was Larry and Sergey wanted.” – 3984

“So … what I underestimated,” he went on, “is that managers always make judgment calls. They have to in order to function. If you’re in a highly technical area, you can’t make good judgment calls if you’re not highly technical yourself. We changed at that point our strategy for hiring managers—away from coordination to saying that what matters most is technical leadership.” – 3994

Part of the power of Google’s brand was the cluelessly geek chic it projected, as though a site serving millions of users around the globe were being run by a handful of nerds who didn’t know any better than to put whatever struck their fancy on the homepage. I think I had a pretty good ear for that nerd voice and was able to channel it into the communications I crafted, but I also know that I always wanted to smooth out the rough edges and make things flow a little more nicely across the screen. It was the English major in me. Sand down too many protruding bits, though, and you end up with a perfect sphere that’s not terribly interesting. – 4322

> Does design do the same thing?

When users posted multiple correct translations, they earned editorial power to overwrite awkward or incorrect submissions made by others. – 4502

My role still had value, because I worked on the language that went into the product itself. But thinking about how users perceived the product, and the company as a whole, was a low priority. The product would speak for itself, so what mattered most was the technology and the cool things that could be done with it. – 4940

The day after the deal went live, John Bauer added code that boldfaced the keyword a user had searched for when it appeared in an ad, making it obvious that the ad was relevant. That single improvement increased clickthrough rates by four hundred percent. One engineer. One change. Four hundred percent. – 5296

For the rest, they gave the okay to go ahead. I quietly rejoiced. I had sold a branding campaign from the nation’s hottest ad agency to two guys who hated anything to do with marketing. It had taken four years, but I had figured out a way to work the system. – 6155

When I first arrived at Google, I felt strongly about things and was often wrong. Fortunately, Larry and Sergey ignored my ideas. I had learned from that experience. Now I felt strongly about things and was often right. Unfortunately, my ideas were still being ignored. I wasn’t sure which slight was more painful, but I suspected it was the latter. – 6340

To launch a radically new product from an established company, Paul asserted, you needed someone who not only believed in it but also was able to make the organization “do the right stuff.” – 6359

Perspective

> A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

– [Andrei Tarkovsky](http://quotevadis.com/post/8689211578/a-thousand-different-books), director of Solaris.

My design heroes

A while back, on the advice of a mentor, I started intentionally following the work and careers of a few designers that I admired. It’s been fascinating to see how they approach projects, and to try their methods and principles in my own design work.

Although I currently work as a software designer, only a few of my design heroes are from that field. Since I am interested in how design can influence culture, I follow several artists, writers, and filmmakers. And since I still have a special place in my heart for physical product design, I keep track of interesting industrial designers as well. So far they’re mostly men, English-speaking and from the US; I need to expand that (suggestions welcome!).

Here are some of the design heroes who have inspired me over the years (in no particular order):

  • Branko Lukic – Founder of NON-OBJECT, a design firm that specializes in, well, non-objects: conceptual product designs intended to make a point. He recently published a book (and iPad app) that features several imaginary products, each following a different philosophy of design. Basically, industrial design without the industry; since as book reviewer William Wiles writes, “industrial designers are in the vice of the cult of use”. Free from any branding, commercial constraints, or even “target users”, Branko’s designs are unique and evocative. I especially like his pebble-shaped MP3 player, where the form factor and presentation suggests a radically different relationship to “technology”. Branko also does consulting for companies and produces more viable designs; it’s interesting to see the relationship between his “artistic” work and his commercial solutions.

  • Elise Boulding – A peace researcher and workshop leader. With her husband Kenneth she wrote many fascinating essays I’ve read in the collection The Future.

  • Kristina Persson – Sweden’s (and the world’s?) first “Minister of the Future”, Persson works with other ministries and organizations to help them focus on the long term issues for their work.

  • Margaret Atwood – Perhaps most famous for The Handmaid’s Tale, though my favorite of her work is the Oryx and Crake series. Her combination of storytelling, futurism, and environmentalism makes for great worldbuilding.

  • Ian Bogost – A game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, I’ve recently started following Ian’s thoughtful and creative writing at The Atlantic.

  • David Eagleman -A neuroscientist and writer who focuses on the uncertainty of knowledge and the importance of diverse imagination. In his incredible book [Sum: 40 tales from the afterlives[(http://www.eagleman.com/sum), he extends the scope of speculative fiction into the afterlife. As with all good speculation, the stories from these imaginary heavens and hells cause you to reflect on this life as well, influencing every reader in new ways. His “possibilianism” movement investigates the limits of science and the role of the unknown in spiritual and scientific practice. His work on time perception is also fascinating and has changed how I get to work every day.

  • Ian Sands – Director of the Envisioning Lab at Microsoft’s Office Labs group, which works on everything from Outlook plugins to touch interfaces to the famous 2019 productivity vision video. I especially admire that Ian has seemingly invented this role and grown this group within Microsoft, a giant tech company, and I hope that points to the value of this work for many companies in the future. Update: Looks like he recently left to start a new firm called Intentional Futures, consulting on some of these same topics. Should be fun to watch!

  • Genevieve Bell – An anthropologist by training, she’s focused on how people use technology around the world. She also wrote a pioneering book on the effects of ubiquitous computing.

  • Stuart Candy – Stuart studied at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, one of the few dedicated futures centers in the world. His blog is probably the best archive of “design fiction” work and ideas on the web, and his own work from Hawaii has really pushed the practice forward in terms of product and process. He now works with Arup in their Foresight team, so we no longer get to see all his work publicly. Fortunately a mutual friend introduced us a while back, and I’m looking forward to following Stuart’s work in the “futures”.

  • Jim Jannard – A designer by training and CEO/founder of both Oakley and RED cameras, Jannard is an inspiring example of how a designer can lead a company. And then buy some islands in Fiji.

  • Jane McGonigal – Jane designs games to save the world. Her large-scale, real-world games have addressed issues such as global extinction threats and personal health goals. Her goal is for a game designer to win the Nobel Peace Prize by 2023.

  • Jonathon Keats – A conceptual artist who creates large scale, constructed thought experiments. Past experiments have included copyrighting his mind, trying to bioengineer God, helping trees paint, and a mobile ringtone based on John Cage’s (silent) composition 4’33”. I like Keats because conceptual art is in practice often quite similar to provocative conceptual design, and studying good conceptual art can push my design work further. Keats starts with an abstract new idea (e.g. “what if trees were artists”?) and then figures out the best way to try it out in the world (“tie paintbrushes to their branches!”). Interestingly, he has at least three separate careers, as an artist, a language critic, and a novelist, referring to the latter two as thought experiments as well.

  • Neal Stephenson – I count Neal as a design hero because he is my favorite living speculative fiction author. His past work has moved from futuristic “science fiction” to “historical fiction” to near-fantasy genres, but in each book he spins out a world that works at least a little differently than ours. His most recent book, Anathem, started from an idea for the 10,000 Year Clock, and he decided to write a novel about a society where scientists lived in monasteries, sequestered from the outside world. He also works as a science advisor to a couple interesting companies, Intellectual Ventures and Blue Origin.

  • Neill Blomkamp – Stuart Candy pointed me to Neill, a filmmaker who combines a cinéma vérité style with incredible digital effects to create new believable worlds. His first feature film, District 9, uses a number of innovative techniques and is an incredible example of concept design and philosophical fiction.

  • Robert Egger – Design director at Specialized Bicycles. I’ve admired Robert’s work for literally decades–ever since I started cycling over 20 years ago. While he manages the day-to-day design work for Specialized products, his most exciting works are the concept bikes he builds on the side. They clearly influence the design direction that Specialized takes and are inspirational and exciting on their own. A racing friend helped connect me with Robert once for a meeting; it was amazing to see inside the shop and learn about his process.

  • Will Wright – Will designed SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, among many other innovative games. I especially enjoy his talks, which are always unpredictable and fascinating. Once at a Stanford talk I attended, he opened a Powerpoint deck with hundreds of slides, then scrolled through them calling out topics that he could cover. Based on votes, he then improvised a talk that connected the most requested topics along with random new ideas. Much of his work is similarly focused on emergent themes; using evolving software and games to explore possible new worlds.

  • Anab Jain – Anab does a wide variety of work, from futurist thinking to interaction design. Her Power of 8 project is a great example of collaborative future-casting. One of my favorite projects is her Yellow Chair, which offered free wifi to anyone as well as a chair to sit in. The way she prototypes in the real world is inspiring and fun.

  • Jason Rohrer – Jason uses often-simple computer games to explore philosophical ideas. His Passage, a 5-minute low-resolution game, was perhaps the most moving experience I’ve ever had with software. His lifestyle and process are unique, but it’s clear that they support his amazing work.

  • Jonathan Harris – LIke Rohrer, Harris focuses on using technology to create emotional experiences. One of his creations, We Feel Fine, takes what was emotional (human experiences) but was put in a less compelling format (online blog entries), and seeks to highlight the emotion again. His manifesto on the digital world is also moving and inspiring. Not a lot of updates since 2009 but I’m still curious about what he’s up to.

  • Brendan Walker – The “world’s only Thrill Engineer”, Brendan started out as an aircraft engineer before studying industrial design and starting his artistic and consulting work. He has designed commercial theme park rides as well as temporary experience installations. When we lived in London I visited (though couldn’t participate in) one of these installations, a simulation of an airplane crash and evacuation in the amazing Shunt Lounge underneath the London Bridge. Brendan now runs Aerial, which “specialises in the creation of tailored emotional experience.” Here’s a fascinating interview about his process from 2008.

  • Matt Jones/Jack Schultze/Matt Webb – These guys would each be formidable on their own, but their work together at Berg London is especially fascinating. Their video sketch “The Journey” was one of the most beautiful and elegant concept videos I’ve seen. I suppose they do commercial work to make money, but their artistic work seems like their true passion–and they combine the two well. Overlapped a bit with Jones during my last year at Google and he’s super thoughtful and kind as well as talented.

  • Brandon Schauer – His cupcake model of product strategy was one of the most influential ideas for my design work in the last year. Brandon is excellent at practicing and teaching design strategy.

  • Johnny Chung Lee – Of Wiimote whiteboard and $14 Steadicam fame. Really insightful and creative guy in both hardware and software; he sees through the technology to what it means for people’s experience. I couldn’t be happier that he’s now working at Google.

  • Mark Coleran – The guy behind many of those gorgeous computer interfaces in movies–the ones which look incredible at first but would probably be a real pain to use all day. Still, his design work pushes the boundaries of UI design and of people’s design expectations for products. Coleran has also worked on a couple real software projects, but his work there is much more tame. It’s been interesting to see the Android Honeycomb design team go in a direction clearly influenced by these future visions, and it will be very interesting to see how it works in practice.

  • Jan Chipchase – The most hardcore design ethnographer I’ve seen. Worked at Nokia for many years, focused on emerging markets. His process involves helping teams of engineers, designers, and researchers go into the field, and then guiding their observations into product insights. His passion for people and their unique behaviors and traits is inspiring, and the little bits he shares with the public on his blog are magical and world-expanding for me.

  • Graham Jenkin – I worked for Graham at Google for several years. He’s a great manager but also a very strong designer, and he continually improves his design skills by stretching to take on new projects. Graham is a great example of design leadership in a big company–he builds strong, trusted relationships while also pushing design boundaries. He encouraged me tremendously in my design growth–including the recommendation to identify and track my design heroes. Plus he has a great accent.

  • Jeff Veen – In the young field of web design, Jeff is the elder statesman. From designing Wired.com and HotBot to founding Adaptive Path and MeasureMap, which led him to Google and his work there, and now on to founding more new companies like Typekit, Jeff has pioneered what a designer can do in the web world. He’s also a 6’6″ cyclist, so he’s a somewhat more believable role model for me.

Notes from Design Driven Innovation

Kindle notes from [Design Driven Innovation, by Roberto Verganti](https://kindle.amazon.com/work/design-driven-innovation-competition-ebook/B002KLOLXE/B002LSI1P0).

*Major impressions*

* While lots of inputs are helpful early in the process, it is ultimately up to individuals to craft pointed visions.
* Focus on the new “meanings” your proposal could bring to people; basically, how will it change their lives in an emotional way?
* One good way to do this is bring in external designers and inspirations; “bridges” to areas that currently have different meanings from your market.
* All design exists in an ecosystem of inspiration, resources, and other designers; engaging with that ecosystem is important.
* Executives need to value design and know how to recruit design leaders. Especially they should appreciate that “the cost of not conceiving a better alternative is often much higher than making the wrong choice among existing alternatives.”
* They also need to have a direction: “No interesting designer in the world will collaborate with a company that does not know where to go,” says Eugenio Perazza
* Imitating other firms is not only a poor strategy for success; it also poisons the well, as innovative designers don’t want to work with imitators.

*What is design-driven innovation?*

> Herbert Simon [said] that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” – 334

> The process of design-driven innovation is a research project-that is, it is exploratory, it aims at creating an entire breakthrough product family or new business, and it occurs before product development (see figure 8-1). It is not the fast creative and brainstorming sessions that are typical of concept generation but rather a deep investigation that, like technological research, escapes attempts to imprison innovation in simple, sequential ten-step rules. – 1837

> It also plants in people’s minds what Swedish neuroscientist David Ingvar has called “memories of the future.” The work of Ingvar and American scientist William Calvin has shown that thinking about potential future developments opens your mind so that you are ready to see the signs relevant to those developments if and when they occur. – 2044

> Three capabilities underpin design-driven innovation: relational assets with key interpreters, internal assets (your own knowledge and seductive power), and the interpretation process. – 2097

*Design as “meaning”:*

> He clarified that “when [ordinary people] … are presented with very personal items, they relate these in the following terms: who gave it to them; how it was acquired; of whom it reminds them; in which circumstances it figured prominently; how much care, service, repair, or even affection it consumed; how well it fits with other possessions; how enjoyable its presence is; how it feels; and how close it is to the user’s definition of him/herself.” – 372

> The way we give meaning to things depends strongly on our values, beliefs, norms, and traditions. In other words, they reflect our cultural model. – 640

> It is the only thing that Target could not imitate. And when it comes to meaning, people are very sensitive to authenticity. – 1041

> When people buy purely functional features, they pay less attention to distinguishing the original innovator from imitators: they look instead for the best utility-price ratio. But when people also seek emotional and symbolic value, possessing the authentic original product makes a formidable difference. In design-driven innovation, people do look for the innovator. Competitors can easily imitate a product’s function and even its form, but they will never be able to imitate its real meaning, because that meaning is inextricably attached to the innovator’s brand. – 2069

*Examples of meaningful designs:*

> The owner uses a remote-control device to alter the colored ambient light according to his mood and the situation. The indigo blue atmosphere, called “dream,” slowly dims as the owner gets into bed. Other configurations of the light encourage relaxation, interactivity, creativity, and love. – 365

> The Wii transformed what a console meant: from an immersion in a virtual world approachable only by niche experts into an active workout, in the real world, for everyone. – 728

> And TV commercials for the Wii reinforced the overturning of meaning. Instead of showing virtual images, the ads turned the camera 180 degrees toward the people who were playing-typically representing many ages-as they moved and enjoyed themselves. – 732

> The Wii does not merely add a new functionality (being sensitive to movements of the controller) to a traditional game console, but creates a radically different meaning that is conveyed by all aspects of the product, including the brand, the product name, and the commercials. – 740

> “Doing your physical therapy is pretty boring,” attested a therapist. “If you can make it into an enjoyable activity where you’re moving physically and going through motions that are helping you recover, and as a part of that you’re playing games that are fun, it’s just a great, creative use of the technology.”7 – 776

> Alessi’s diagram to measure the innovativeness of a proposal – 1435

*The context for design-driven innovation:*

> Executives who have invested in radical innovation of meaning acknowledge that rather than start with user needs, the process goes in the opposite direction: the company proposes a breakthrough vision. – 586

> When investing in radical innovation of meaning, companies such as Artemide and Alessi take a step back and investigate the evolution of society, economy, culture, art, science, and technology. – 662

> When we want to develop design-driven innovations, therefore, an interesting question is, What other companies in other industries are targeting the same people in the same life context? Which kinds of other products or services are these people using, or could they use? All these interpreters have some knowledge of the meanings and languages we are investigating. And they would probably be eager to share it and to understand our interpretations, as they confront the same problems and have the same interests. – 1399

> Developing a scenario with noncompeting firms also makes it more likely that a coherent way of living will occur in the market, because the actors will create products and services that fit together both functionally and symbolically. – 1404

> We found, first, that innovators tend to rely on external designers more than their competitors do. – 1492

> If you only have an internal design staff, even an enormously talented one, you are inherently limited by their existing world view and experiences. – 1494

> Successful manufacturers have an average portfolio of 11.9 external design firms, compared with 4.4 for imitators, with companies such as B&B and Kartell having about 30 each. That average does not include Artemide and Alessi, which cooperate with more than 50 and 200 external design firms, respectively, each with a different voice in and opinion on the design discourse. – 1500

> According to Sottsass, “I’m always offended when they say that I play when I do Memphis work; actually I’m very serious, I’m never more serious than when I do Memphis work. It’s when I design machines for Olivetti that I play.” 19 – 1594

> A study by Michael Farrell explains why radical innovations often occur within collaborative circles. By analyzing major shifts in literature, painting, and science, he shows how breakthrough thinking benefits from the interaction, mutual trust, and sense of mission typical of circles. They provide an encouraging, familiar, segregated environment where pioneering minds can explore new avenues. Within this environment, members are more likely to survive skepticism and criticism by the dominant culture. They realize they are not alone, and they sustain each other in early experiments through the frustration of failure. – 1779

> In particular, the design-driven lab embraces four activities: The first concerns *strategy*. The lab is the most attentive observer and champion of opportunities for design-driven innovation…The second role of the design-driven lab is to enable the development and renewal of *relational assets*…The third role of the design-driven lab is to nurture the interpretation process-that is, to *enable* design-driven research projects…Finally, the design-driven lab helps your company address the design *discourse*. – 2189-2205

> The design-driven lab is, rather, an enabler-a methodological repository whose role is to value all these companywide assets and direct, harness, focus, build, and transform them into real value. – 2211

*The role of executives:*

> Setting the direction, attracting and selecting key interpreters, and choosing the vision are the three key roles of top executives who want to promote design-driven innovation. – 2285

> Executives do not need to be inventors, just as art dealers do not need to be artists. Both build their competitive advantage on their ability to identify, attract, and select key interpreters. The successful art dealer is one who is capable of finding the talents of the future and developing privileged relationships with them while competitors are still looking at acknowledged, mainstream artists. – 2298

> On the one hand, they keep an eye on the institutionalized design discourse. – 2319

> Sometimes I have the feeling that some executives are afraid of what they offer. If we asked them whether they would put their nametags on their products and services, they would probably decline, saying, “Our product reflects the merit of our design team.” Or, “We start from what users want. Our product is molded on their needs.” This implicitly also means that if the product fails, or if users are not completely delighted, it’s the responsibility of the design team or the users themselves. But Steve Jobs is saying, “We do not think most users will miss the optical drive.” And given that he is saying that, he is putting his nametag on the product. – 2343

> Many of these executives are entrepreneurs. They have invested their own money. They are therefore extremely interested in financial payback. And they have shown that management practices can be more financially effective when they are not culturally neutral. – 2365

> “We portray the manager as facing a set of alternatives from which a choice must be made. This decision attitude assumes it is easy to come up with alternatives to consider, but difficult to choose among them. The design attitude towards problem solving, in contrast, assumes that it is difficult to design a good alternative, but once you have developed a truly good one, the decision about which alternative to select is trivial. The design attitude appreciates that the cost of not conceiving a better alternative is often much higher than making the wrong choice among existing alternatives. – 2480

*How to do the process:*

> First, Ernesto Gismondi says, the company looks at people, not users. When a company gets very close to a user, it sees him changing a lightbulb and loses the cognitive and sociocultural context-the fact that he has children, a job, and, most of all, aspirations and dreams. – 666

> More precisely, the process of design-driven innovation is rooted in three actions (see figure 6-3): Listening to the design discourse…Interpreting…Addressing the design discourse: – 1434

> This process is significantly different from the user-centered processes you are used to. First, the process speaks of deep research rather than fast brainstorming, of developing and sharing knowledge rather than pursuing extemporaneous creativity. This process resembles engineering research (although targeting meanings rather than technologies) more than the work of a creative agency. – 1442

> The process of design-driven innovation – 1949

> You should first identify the life context that is the focus of your innovation strategy. Next you should identify the categories of interpreters who are concerned with that life context. Then you should ask your firm’s organizational units that already have significant contacts with people in those categories to help identify potential interpreters. – 2135

*The role of the individual designer (or “interpreter”):*

> First, a company should define the life context that its innovation project is addressing. For Barilla, that life context is a home kitchen. Second, a company should ask, Who are the interpreters who conduct research on how people could give meaning to things in that same life context, and who are likely to influence the emergence of new meanings? – 1513

> The difference between innovators and imitators seems to stem from which interpreters firms choose. – 1526

> Promoting a vision in which every designer is alike (see the dashed line in figure 7-3) implies transforming design into a commodity: the same qualities appear wherever you look.? – 1542

> Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior VP for design, acted as a broker of languages: before joining Apple, he had been an independent design consultant in London. His firm, Tangerine, was involved in designing household products (for example, Tangerine was a consultant for Ideal Standard, then a player in the bathroom and plumbing industry). Ive held the perfect network position to give Apple access to a world of household meanings and languages unknown to any other computer company. – 1624

> An important criterion in identifying key interpreters, then, is to look for people who can act as bridges-that is, those who do not belong to your industry but who target your same life context. The more you create bridges to worlds that are relevant for your users but that are unusual for your competitors, the more you have a chance to end up with breakthrough proposals. – 1633

> Indeed, a company that wants to start to create design-driven innovations, but has not yet built an extensive dialogue with the design discourse, may find this second type of interpreter, who helps build the firm’s network, much more useful than brokers who provide solutions directly. – 1645

> By continuing to talk and write about the product’s role and meaning, the members of the design discourse disseminated knowledge of it to a wider audience. In the end they acted as amplifiers of a message they had helped to construct (see figure 8-2). – 1883

*How to work with design interpreters:*

> However, most companies use regional centers only as antennas to detect local trends rather than to mediate local talent. The result is that large corporations often have no knowledge of the rich web of local relationships developed by their units, and they seldom leverage the full potential of global design. – 1704

> Yet if you ask Mendini why he cooperated with Alessi, his answer has a completely different tone: “It is hard for me to distinguish if I’m working for Alessi or if Alessi is working for me.” – 1713

> “No interesting designer in the world will collaborate with a company that does not know where to go,” says Eugenio Perazza, – 2107

*How to introduce meaningful designs:*

> Prototypes make authorship manifest so that the interpreters in the design discourse can help the innovator build and defend its reputation. From that moment on, other companies in the industry will seldom use a similar vision, unless they acquire a reputation as imitators-not only among customers but also among interpreters. And imitators are not considered attractive by elite circles. – 2073

> What makes this imitative strategy ineffective is that market feedback is-at an initial stage-very ambiguous, with several languages coexisting. As we have seen, the design discourse consists not of linear discussions but of open debates, as participants consider different visions simultaneously. Imitators-less skilled at design-driven research-can hardly interpret the meaning of these debates. In the beginning, it is unclear which product will be the winner, as new meanings introduced by an innovator often convert users slowly and take off gradually. Imitators perceive semiotic chaos and eventually chase everyone and imitate everything, launching products with different meanings and languages, further jeopardizing their brand. – 2079

*Followup:*

> [www.designdriveninnovation.com](www.designdriveninnovation.com) – 264

> Regarding media, see Jay Greene, “[Where Designers Rule: Electronics Maker Bang & Olufsen Doesn’t Ask Shoppers What They Want; Its Faith Is in Its Design Gurus](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_45/b4057057.htm)” Business Week, November 5, 2007; Jeffrey E Durgee, “[Freedom for Superstar Designers? Lessons from Art History](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4143/is_200607/ai_n17173866/),” Design Management Review 17, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 29-34. An example of the superstar stereotype is Van den Poop, a fictional superstar designer invented by IKEA to challenge high-end furniture manufacturers. Van den Puup, who appeared in IKEA advertisements in the United Kingdom, is the quintessential personification of the capricious and elitist design guru. A flamboyant figure, physically halfway between Philippe Starck and Marcel Wanders, he dictates the latest rules of luxury lifestyle and throws fits when he sees that IKEA can manufacture similar things at a low price. See his fictional Web site at [http://www. elitedesigners.org/](http://www. elitedesigners.org/). – 2645

> “Memphis Remembered,” Design boom, [http://www.designboom.com/eng/ funclub/memphisremember.html](http://www.designboom.com/eng/ funclub/memphisremember.html). – 2671

> Hargadon and Robert I. Sutton, “[Building an Innovation Factory](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Building+an+Innovation+Factory),” Harvard Business Review (May-June 2000): 157-166; – 2683