Technology

The sweet spot of innovation

> Q: How many designers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

> A: Does it really have to be a light bulb?

Designers are (in)famous for always trying to come up with the unexpected; the “next big thing”. Early in my career I even described my goal as delivering “not what was asked for, but something new and better”. It’s a dangerous trait that often puts us at odds with our teammates, who are typically more focused on tangible metrics and engineering milestones.

When I worked on Glass, there was disagreement among team members about whether we were building a research prototype or a mass-market consumer product. A research project would focus on pushing the boundaries and learning as much as possible. A consumer product would need to fit existing use cases and appeal to a wide audience. Unsurprisingly, people on each side of the argument proposed wildly different approaches to product design, engineering, marketing, and sales.

In the end, [we built a research prototype and marketed it as a consumer product](http://www.adweek.com/digital/google-exec-blames-google-glass-failure-bad-marketing-163535/), which didn’t work out very well. We didn’t achieve success in the market, and because we were distracted by selling, we didn’t learn as much as we should have. Glass was the classic example of a product that was ahead of its time…but of course [being too early is the same as being wrong](http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-failures-2011-5).

[This talk by Jon Friedman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5MGVbRLHaQ), a designer who worked on the Kin, the Courier, SPOT watches and other Microsoft hardware misadventures, tells some of the same stories. I admire Jon’s work (and I loved the Kin!), but watching the talk I became increasingly uncomfortable with the repeated similar failures. After all, the point of “failing fast” is not the failing–it’s the learning. Designers of these highly innovative products aren’t learning the lessons of past failures.

Glass and the failed Microsoft products share at least one trait: they all tried to change entire systems, all at once. Glass innovated on form factor, hardware technology, interface design, software architecture, marketing, sales, and support. The Microsoft Kin had new industrial design, stored your phone in the cloud, and changed the way you pay for the phone.

One of the most interesting lessons I learned from working for Tony Fadell (who took over the Glass project) was the idea that a new product should be 90% familiar and 10% wildly innovative. A product that’s too far out, that doesn’t feel connected to anything people recognize, will be too uncomfortable to succeed. But of course if you’re not innovative enough, no one will need what you’ve built. So now I set up an “innovation budget” to track how much change my designs are forcing on people, and I’m careful to keep that amount in check. The goal is to find the “sweet spot” of innovation where a design is both desirable and acceptable.

Friedman [goes on to describe his own career shift](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5MGVbRLHaQ&t=26m32s) from working on early-stage speculative new products to making smaller improvements to the Exchange platform, a mature system with lots of customers. He found that it was not only an interesting design challenge, but also fulfulling to make an immediate difference at scale.

He also describes a strategy of combining “something new and something old”–taking new technology into existing markets, or existing technology into new markets. In either case, you only have to invent half of the solution, as the other half has already been figured out.

Paul Rand said “Don’t try to be original; just try to be good.” Innovation is plentiful in design today…it’s important to stay focused on making the “basics” great as well. To evolve my younger self’s goal: the sweet spot of innovation is the place where you fulfill what was asked for, *and* provide something better.

Doing more with less

The fundamental challenge of our generation is to design lifestyles that everyone wants and the earth can support forever. [Buckminster Fuller put it well](http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/buckminster_fuller/buckyfullermemoriallecture.shtml):

> The possibility of a good life for any man depends upon the possibility of realizing it for all men. I must be able to convert the resources of the earth, doing more with less, until I reach a point where we can do so much as to be able to service all men in respect to all their needs.

Harnessing AI to build better UI

A fascinating article (and set of demos) about [how generative and improvisational AI techniques could help us invent better interfaces](https://distill.pub/2017/aia/), and better ways of thinking for humans:

> At its deepest, interface design means developing the fundamental primitives human beings think and create with…

> We’ve described a third view, in which AIs actually change humanity, helping us invent new cognitive technologies, which expand the range of human thought. Perhaps one day those cognitive technologies will, in turn, speed up the development of AI, in a virtuous feedback cycle.

So not *just* computers quickly generating lots of options based on existing pieces, but helping us think up new ways to frame the questions, and build new tools to explore them. Your next design colleague could be a machine.

Intelligent and docile

> The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. – [I. J. Good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._J._Good)

Machine fashion

Computers are great at generating lots of options…not so great at choosing the best ones. So you can guess what happens [when they start generating novelty t-shirt ideas](https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_pg_1?srs=16325482011&rh=i%3Aspecialty-aps%2Ck%3Acola&keywords=cola&ie=UTF8&qid=1502249965).



Why Elon Musk is working on brain interfaces

Because any other way of evolving humans isn’t fast enough:

> Genetics is just too slow, that’s the problem. For a human to become an adult takes twenty years. We just don’t have that amount of time. –
[Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future – Wait But Why](http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)

What computers can teach us about the world

By thinking differently than humans do:

> Our machines now are letting us see that even if the rules the universe plays by are not all that much more complicated than Go’s, the interplay of everything all at once makes the place more contingent than Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, or even some Chaos theorists thought. It only looked orderly because our instruments were gross, because our conception of knowledge imposes order by simplifying matters until we find it, and because our needs were satisfied with approximations…

> The nature of the world is closer to the way our network of computers and sensors represent it than how the human mind perceives it. Now that machines are acting independently, we are losing the illusion that the world just happens to be simple enough for us wee creatures to comprehend.

Civilization as AI

[Smart perspective on “artificial intelligence” from Brian Eno](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26191):

> Global Civilisation is something we humans created, though none of us really know how. It’s out of the individual control of any of us—a seething synergy of embodied intelligence that we’re all plugged into. None of us understands more than a tiny sliver of it, but by and large we aren’t paralysed or terrorised by that fact—we still live in it and make use of it.

Investing in Omaha

In an age when all the attention is on rich Silicon Valley people [designing things for each other](http://mashable.com/2014/10/16/startups-for-rich-people/), it’s interesting to read [why the world’s most successful investor lives in Omaha, Nebraska](http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-berkshire-omaha-2012-8):

> Buffett is known for investing in quality businesses that have fallen out of favor with the market, and he said being in Omaha helped him do that.

> “In some places it’s easy to lose perspective. But I think it’s very easy to keep perspective in a place like Omaha,” he said.

> Buffett said being far from Wall Street actually helped him.”It’s very easy to think clearly here. You’re undisturbed by irrelevant factors and the noise generally of business investments…If you can’t think clearly in Omaha, you’re not going to think clearly anyplace.”

I’ve worked with several rich and famous technologists, and I always wonder if their prior success helps or hinders their future efforts. I think it’s a bit of each, but no matter how rich you are, there’s one thing you can’t buy–the groundedness and perspective of life outside the bubble.

Digital despair

[Neal Stephenson identifies the paradox](http://damiengwalter.com/2014/05/07/nealstephenson/) of a tech-centered society that is attracted to visions of technology failing:

> At the mass-market consumer level, we have a strange state of affairs in which people are eager to vote with their dollars, pounds and Euros for the latest tech but they flock to movies depicting a relentlessly depressing view of the future, and resist any tech deployed on a large scale, in a centralized way, such as wind turbine farms.

Previously: [The impact of the future](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=5420)