Joel Garreau on human enhancements

GBN offers a quick review of Joel Garreau's presentation on the future of human nature. It's mostly about human enhancement. Some excerpts I found interesting here:

The first scenario is called Heaven, and its “poster child” is the much decorated entrepreneur and technologist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil looks at the technology curve and sees what humans can conquer through technology: disease, suffering, ugliness, stupidity, pain, being fat, forgetfulness, and possibly even death. He sees that curve going straight up, so that it effectively becomes indistinguishable from the Christian version of heaven. Kurzweil goes so far as to say if you can live well for the next 20 years, and you have a good medical plan, you could be effectively immortal because the technology will be moving that fast. But even in the face of such wonders, in this scenario, humans are more or less spectators. Technologies seem in control.

The Hell scenario is the mirror image of the Heaven scenario in a lot of ways. The spokesperson for this scenario is Bill Joy, the former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems. Joy looks at the same information that Ray Kurzweil does and says, “It could all go the other way.” He absolutely agrees that we are on this curve of exponential technological change that is changing what it means to be human. But he worries that this power could get into the hands of nutcases, with extremely bad consequences. The optimistic view of the Hell scenario is that we extinct the human species in 20 to 25 years. The pessimistic view is that we wipe out all of life on Earth.

The third scenario is called Prevail, and it is advocated by computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. While both Heaven and Hell are techno-determinist, taking as a given that our technologies control our future rather than the other way around, Prevail is essentially betting on “the cussedness of human nature.” The fundamental assumption of prevail is that while our technologies may be following a smooth curve, human history hasn’t run straight—it has taken many dips and loops and reverses. In this scenario, people start processing a wide variety of ways to shape our future, rather than have it shaped by technologies, and quickly and pragmatically picking the ones that work.

Translating Research Insights into Innovation

After perusing , I was wondering about the last part of the document: Translating Insight into Innovation . Basically, the document presents how Intel use ethnographic research to drive technology innovation. Of course, the emphasis is more on the field studies and 2 applications that emerges from them. To me, I feel like there is a huge gap between the very rich and well-documented ethnographic studies (Genevieve Bell's research for instance) and the two applications presented here (The China Home Learning PC and Intel’s iCafé platform). Well of course:

• Intel won't enter too much into some details about how they translate those insights into innovation because it is a strategic added value.
• I haven't tested those applications so I should shut my mouth
• I won't do better myself

However I do feel like it's a reality: it's tremendously difficult to turn research insights (about user's culture, context, psychology, needs, beliefs...) into a product. Anyway, it's not always the case that such research HAS TO BE turned into a product/application/product, I am a bit extreme here. The company's business process may include all this bunch of facts/ideas into something less formal as Bell says on here homepage: The goal of ethnographic research at Intel is to bring the human component into discussions about technology. Intel gains a lot of value from ethnographic studies. "It's not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it's going to be useful to consumers. We need as many tools and as many ways of getting at who these people are as we can get, and ethnography is a powerful way of doing it," (...) Part of the challenge is to try and find those opportunity spaces, so you need to be out in the field a lot, doing research. And you need time back at Intel to try and make sense of what you've seen. (...) Ethnographic research can inform business decision-making at Intel with the rich textures of real-life experiences. It balances the traditional business model by embracing the human side of using technology and the Internet in everyday life.

Besides, the most important thing is that such research AT LEAST gives a human touch to some technological thinkers who tend to forget that the users are human and... ok let's re-read Norman's Psychology of Everyday Things

Finally, another last thing: transforming research/R&D/marketing/... into "something" seem to be very discussed lately at a broader level (I mean not the company level but instead at the country level). Two books (in France and in Switzerland as I described here) dealt with that issue at the country level; accounting that France/Switzerland have a powerful R&D but it often failed at turning this into concrete outcome/experiences/products/success stories.

mmh I think this post just express my avidity to know more about how companies/institutions turn research results into innovations...

Add-on: reading Looking Across the Atlantic: Using Ethnographic Methods to Make Sense of Europe, there are some information I could gather about this topic:

This fieldwork was prompted by an internal request from an Intel product group to determine the characteristics of chome life in Western Europe relevant to the design of consumer computing products and servicesc(...) People and Practices Research has been charged with the task of understanding people and their daily practices with an eye to finding new users and new uses for technology. (...) We attempt to translate insights about peoples’ behavior into product concepts, technology innovations, and strategic long-range planning [are ethnographers taking part of the esign process? -nick] Knowing these stories, interests, and patterns makes it possible to design and develop products and services that fit (intuitively) into people’s lives.

And all of this is an hard job:

But in truth, the fieldwork was the easy part; making sense of all this material and conveying those insights back to product groups and other audiences within Intel was a much bigger challenge.

Show your context, show your inspiration!

I discovered a cool column in gamasutra (web bible for game designers). It's called media consumption and the point is to "ask game designers what their favorite game designers have been listening to, watching, reading, and playing". For instance, have a glance at this one who is a Netflix fan. As a matter of fact, I think there is a new trend lately in creative industries: quoting your sources/inspiration or the context where you are (and which may influence what you do). It's something that seem to be both synchronous (people show what their listening to in itunes as an ichat tagline, or write which songs they're listening to in a blogpost + the geographical coordinates of a picture/blogpost...) or asynchronous (people writing in their dissertation/articles/journal what they listened to while writing it).

What is interesting here is that trying to find how some creative production has been influences by this context+ inspiration is an intriguing intellectual trick/activity :)

Social sciences, computer science and design

An interesting article in the Financial Times about anthropologists and taking users needs into account in design. Very related to the one in the NYT I mentioned yesterday. Here are some excerpts I found relevant:

The idea of using social scientists to find out more about potential customers is not new – in 1979, for example, Xerox hired anthropologist Lucy Suchman at its Palo Alto Research Center. But the idea has resurfaced as big technology companies believe anthropologists can deliver insights that remain undiscovered by traditional quantitative research methods. Xerox researchers today use a technique known as ethnomethodology, which involves visiting workplaces and observing working practices without preconceptions.

Peter Tolmie, the area manager of Xerox’s work practice technology group in France, says: “Standard marketing research and statistical data is often frustratingly shallow when you want to move towards designing technology.”

The advantage of using anthropologists is that they can bring a fresh perspective to a subject, says Ms Bell: “I’m always looking for the ethnographic story that totally turns your world on its ear, the thing that challenges some really basic core assumption you have made.” One such moment for her came when she interviewed a Malaysian man about his mobile phone, and discovered he was using its GPS function every day to find Mecca. “Here’s a piece of technology that is being held up as the quintessential symbol of modernity being used to support a set of cultural practices that have 1,700 years of time depth,” says Ms Bell.

As part of a project on the needs of remote workers, a Microsoft team member spent a day in a police car, observing how the officer worked – noting, for example, that a scene-of-crime report that took 30minutes to write by hand had later to be typed into a computer at the police station. This kind of observational material is fed back to developers, and is scheduled to be reflected in a forthcoming version of MS Office.

Innovation and sex

Yes, porn/sex stuff are a driving force with regard to innovation/technologies. There is a recent article about this in New Scientist entitled "Why we all need pornography" by Annalee Newitz.

Porn fans are the driving force behind technologies that we might one day all rely on to protect our identity THE makers of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are facing an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission after it emerged that explicit sex scenes were hidden inside the popular game's software.(...) But it is not the first time technology has been used to offer people a sneaky peek at sex. The "adult entertainment" industry embraced video cassettes, DVDs and the web more quickly than its mainstream counterparts because these media are tailor-made for private viewing. Consumers eager for a glimpse of skin, but afraid of being found out or of being spotted in a seedy blue-movie cinema, helped drive the demand for more of these technologies.

Why do I blog this? I am intererested in the domain that drives innovation, video games play a a huge role in this but sex is definitely important too. There is no judgement in this statement, I think it's just a fact. The french minitel worked pretty well because of that for instance ("le minitel rose"). I don't know is some people investigate this issue; there should be lot of things to tackle like ranging from how it can create business models to the specific products/technologies that can be invented to fulfill users' needs (and later which could be transfered to other domains)...

Technorati Tags: game, innnovation, sex

DoCoMo's ways to increase its revenues = :(

In last week issue of Business Week, there was an interesting interview of NTT DoCoMo's CEO Masao Nakamura. The interview reflects the troubles they have to get DoCoMo sales back on track and how to get revenues growing again:

Q: Those measures might stabilize the situation, but how do you get revenues growing again? A: We have to grow the traffic volume -- not voice, but data traffic. If you look at the overall customer base, 80% of our customers are either not using data service at all or only slightly for mail transmission only. Just increasing the usage of those customers by 100 yen a month could provide a huge boost to our revenue.

One possibility is pushing information out to customers in order to get them to use data more frequently. The second booster would be visual communication service such as video phones and live video streaming.

Q: What are you doing to develop that? A: We are having a hard time convincing customers to take up video-phone conversations. Grandparents might want to talk to their grandchildren over the video phone, but that's about it. Another factor is that until now, the number of customers owning a videophone-compatible handset was limited. So they weren't able to find people to call. But I think we can resolve this issue by increasing the number of subscribers.

Also, some women, for instance, don't want to pick up a videophone call when they're not wearing makeup -- so the first connection will be established by voice. But when they're ready, they will be able to switch over to videophone.

We also have another feature that enables an avatar to replace the caller. A cartoon character can be shown instead, and when you're ready, you can switch over to your own face. But videophone service is not really rooted in the culture yet, so we have to try to further promote this service.

It seems that their solutions to increase their revenues are rather weak. I am not definitely not a firm believer in videophones, and this avatar thing is really a poor innovation. Besides, I hate this idea of "80% of our customers are either not using data service" so let's push them to send lots of crap to use the bandwidth. At Telecom 2003 in Geneva, I was a bit shocked by the way they want the phone to be a remote control from everything (home lights, tv...) obliging users to pay (using mobile network) to control standard features (switching my tv) at home. I understand that it's how the market behaves but c'mon it really sucks.

On a different note, I would really know more about this stance: "some women, for instance, don't want to pick up a videophone call when they're not wearing makeup", what is this?

The other part of the interview are also interesting; for instance there is a discussion about whether DoCoMo's move to 3G might have been to quick. The other markets they are targeting are also boring, déjà vu and not promising:

We might see some content in providing education. In Japan, there are courses that people go after school in order to prepare for college entrance examinations, and the quiz could be offered on cellphones so that the children can punch in the answers and save time on their studies. [vow what a statement!!!!] Online auctions are becoming available. There are many other kinds of content that have been offered only on PCs, but those can be modified to be offered on cellphones.

The last claim is useless, maybe does he mean that only our imagination is the limit to what we can envision as applications? Somehow I feel that they guy has a very strange discourse, absolutely not innovative and even less user-centered. Is there really not anything more interesting to offer to the users? Absolutely not mention of games, maps or some application related to a concrete user need. I don't get it and it seems that competitors (for instance KDDI who funded the first version the mobile game Mogi Mogi was doing better).

Why do I blog this? carriers' strategy is interesting since they should innovate to keep their customers/users happy but in this case innovation is pretty low. Maybe the best innovation they mention is "a less-expensive model that has fewer features than the highest-end models" because it can fit to real users' demands and needs :( Well I am not really correct here, they do have interesting innovation like this WiFi/cell-phone combination.

Technorati Tags: docomo, mobile phone, puppy, videophone

Mapping technologies evolution

Still in the IHT, an interesting account of how map web services emerged ans how they will evolve:

In 1991, David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University, proposed using software to create a computer simulation of the physical world, making it possible to map everything from traffic flow and building layouts to sales and currency data on a computer screen. Gelernter's idea came a step closer to reality in the past few weeks when both Google and Yahoo published documentation making it significantly easier for programmers to link virtually any kind of Internet data to Web-based maps and, in Google's case, satellite imagery.

Since the Google and Yahoo tools were released, their uses have been demonstrated in dozens of ways by hobbyists and companies, including an annotated map guide to the California wineries and restaurants that appeared in the movie ''Sideways'' and instant maps showing the locations of the recent bombing attacks in London. Later in the summer, Microsoft plans to introduce a competing service, Virtual Earth, with software that will enable programmers to use it in similarly creative ways.

So far, the uses have been noncommercial. But Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are creating the services in the expectation that they will become a focal point in one of the next significant growth areas in Internet advertising: contextual advertisements tied to specific locations. Such ads would be embedded into maps generated by a search query or run alongside them. (...) ''In the past there was a grain-silo approach to controlling the technology,'' said Nathan Torkington, director of Where 2.0, a location technology and mapping conference held last month in San Francisco. ''Now we're seeing the distribution of mapping technology.''

Why do I blog this? even though I don't like the "contextual advertisements tied to specific locations" thing, it's definitely true, mapping services is a both a top-down (availability of technologies thanks to big companies) and bottom-up (map hackers developed applications) phenomenon. Which is an interesting innovation model.

Electronics companies less reluctant towards enthusiasts' modifications

A great article in Washington Post about the fact that electronics companies less reluctant towards enthusiasts' modifications. what is interesting here is that you cannot suspect journals like the Washington Post to be really hacker-driven. The trend now seems to be recognized at the business level.

Sometimes, tinkerers become a consumer electronics maker's unofficial research-and-development team, with innovations winding up as built-in features down the line. (...) Saffo said he thinks it makes good business sense for gadget makers to keep an eye on the enhancements, tweaks and hacks that users are making. It's not the executives in the boardroom who figure out how to make a gadget great, Saffo said, but the "fanatics and renegades and people in garages. . . . Hackers create markets."

Unfortunately some companies are still nervous with it:

But many consumer-electronics makers discourage such activity. At the very least, anyone who cracks open the case on a new handheld computer, video game console or digital music player is probably voiding the warranty. At worst, hackers can undermine a company's business.

However Torrone has a relevant final word:

Phillip Torrone, an editor at the techie-oriented Make magazine, said Sony's hard-line stance could be self-defeating. Each attempt to thwart hackers makes them more determined to do their tricks, he said.

Even mainstream users who want to jazz up their devices wind up turning to the Internet for underground help, where they also can learn how to get pirated software and movies. Torrone, who plays a homebrewed version of chess on his PSP, said he thinks he has a better idea for gadget makers. "I think the really smart companies should release their products to the alpha geeks for six months and let the alpha geeks play around with them," he said. "It seems to me they'd save a lot of money on R&D, and they'd come out with much more solid products."

Why do I blog this? I am definitely convinced that allowing users to tinker with products is a great a source for new ideas. I've heard that Nintendo may allow users to develop their own independent game which is even more interesting. It also reminds me what Frederic Kaplan from Sony CSLtold me at the CAIF workshop: some innovation are influenced by the tremendous feedback AIBO designers and researchers receives from fans. They go to robot conventions and exchange a lot with those people, allowing them to improve their R&D ideas.

Technology as material in design

Technology as material in design by Johan Redström is a very relevant paper in the journal Design Philosophy. It's about the ambivalence between materiality and immateriality in design and the relations with technology. I won't enter into too much details but I think the starting point is very pertinent:

In many ways, design has been moving away from the physical object. Emerging practices such as interaction, experience and service design, often utilising new technologies with almost ‘immaterial’ properties, seem to point to a situation where the material ‘thing’ as we used to know it is replaced by communication, information, systems and infrastructures.

From another perspective, however, the importance of the things themselves is being re-discovered, and perhaps these new ‘immaterial’ technologies play a role in this.[3] A central reason for this shift is that though technical objects are often characterised by their practical functionality, their everyday lives seem a bit more complicated than these official functions might suggest. Thus, the predominant focus on practical functionality in the design of technical objects need to reconsidered and above all complemented.

As we turn to these things, we do not only have to re-locate the functions of technical objects within a rich context of use; to understand the presence of technical objects, we also need to consider the materials that build them. In what follows, I will present some ideas on how the properties of technologies (such as information technology) seem to influence the way we think about the design of technical objects. Further, I will try to challenge the instrumental perspective on technology by considering it to be design material, asking question about it such as: what are its expressions as material? What are its form elements?

Why do I blog this? I am not into the design field but sometime I have a glance at what designers do or think, it's always refreshing to get other insights. Trying to see what is important for them is interesting for me to see how user experience analysis might help them.

A dark age of Innovation?

New Scientist has an intringuing piece about innovation, related to the fact that may we have reached a peak of innovation. It's controversial but the conclusion is based on interesting facts. Some excerpts below:

according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. (...) In an effort to find out, he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him. Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915. (...) The global rate of innovation today, which is running at seven "important technological developments" per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding "it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology", Huebner says. (...) But today's much larger population means that the number of innovations per year will still be far higher than in medieval times. "I'm certainly not predicting that the dark ages will reoccur in 2024, if at all," he says. Nevertheless, the point at which an extrapolation of his global innovation curve hits zero suggests we have already made 85 per cent of the technologies that are economically feasible.

But why does he think this has happened? He likens the way technologies develop to a tree. "You have the trunk and major branches, covering major fields like transportation or the generation of energy," he says. "Right now we are filling out the minor branches and twigs and leaves. The major question is, are there any major branches left to discover? My feeling is we've discovered most of the major branches on the tree of technology."

I am looking foward to see the critiques... there are already coming from Kurzweil (AI/Music research) or Drexler (nanotech):

But artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil - who formulated the aforementioned law - thinks Huebner has got it all wrong. "He uses an arbitrary list of about 7000 events that have no basis as a measure of innovation. If one uses arbitrary measures, the results will not be meaningful."

Eric Drexler, who dreamed up some of the key ideas underlying nanotechnology, agrees. "A more direct and detailed way to quantify technology history is to track various capabilities, such as speed of transport, data-channel bandwidth, cost of computation," he says. "Some have followed exponential trends, some have not." Drexler says nanotechnology alone will smash the barriers Huebner foresees, never mind other branches of technology

And of course, there are intermediary views:

A middle path between Huebner's warning of an imminent end to tech progress, and Kurzweil and Smart's equally imminent encounter with a silicon singularity, has been staked out by Ted Modis, a Swiss physicist and futurologist.

Modis agrees with Huebner that an exponential rate of change cannot be sustained and his findings, like Huebner's, suggest that technological change will not increase forever. But rather than expecting innovation to plummet, Modis foresees a long, slow decline that mirrors technology's climb.

I would like to see more research about this, with an historical spin, expanding the time span to a broader scale. Besides, what would be the consequences? especially in terms of social/societal terms.

Citizen journalism

I am not so used to know what happen in the field, but it's however interesting. Østfold University College in Norway conducted a research experiment in which people used standard mobile phones (such as the Nokia 6630) to provide coverage of the historical opening of a new main bridge between Sweden and Norway. The real-time coverage was provided by reporters in "the field" and builds on the concept of citizen journalism.

New tech/user-centered blog

Laurent finally started his own technology/user-centered blog (Bohellz just gave birth to a ballpark). It's called ballpark. The mooto si simple:

This blog is trying to capture the constant integration of technologies in our daily lifes.

Stay tuned! It's already filled with good content like his reboot conference notes.

Executives should go to media art festivals

This afternoon talk at reboot 7 must see: Why executives should go to media art festivals by regine

New media artists, hackers or interaction designers use (misuse) technology to come up with weird projects. But apart from being quirky, fun and surprising, many artists manage to capture the zeitgeist, the essence and preoccupations of our society better than some sociological surveys. Couldn’t their view of the world be useful to tech companies?

Go regine go! Why do I blog this? well even though I could not make it to reboot, I know approximately the content of regine's talk since it's a topic we exchanged about. I like her point and I would say that a good surveillance of what's happening in the underground (not only about art but also nerd things...) is a perfect way to have an approximative picture of what's going to rock in the near future. That's definitely why you should read her blog! Of course, it's a matter of making sense of all this stuff. I would say that being aware of this sort of tech, on a regular basis, can allow reader to feel patterns (like the momentum in LBS last year or tangible interactions lately).

Note abour reboot: notes from participants are gathered here. Of course there is also a technorati watchlist

Military tech versus street tech

Interesting discussion on PopSci: Military Tech Versus Street Tech: Who’s Got the Edge? by James Vlahos. I picked up what I found relevant:

The question naturally occurs: Who gets the better stuff, soldiers or civilians? The military’s gear is often tougher (witness their laptops and cars), more precise and sometimes just plain better, because extreme situations require extreme gear. (...) The military has traditionally tried to develop, own, and control its own technology. But the thinking is shifting, and procurement officers now get pats on the back when they fulfill a military need with a consumer product. The new approach has forged strange alliances, such as the Army’s partnership with the video game industry (...) It would be shortsighted, of course, to discuss what’s happening with military tech without discussing what’s happening with the military.(...) New conflicts—smaller, urban, unconventional—will require new tools and tactics. “Soldier-centric warfare” and “situational awareness” are the buzz phrases, because tanks and bombs have limits when you’re fighting among civilians. This combat paradigm places an increased emphasis on the very sort of high-tech tools civilians use. You depend on your PDA to remind you of a lunch meeting. Soldiers, linked by wireless networks, may soon be using theirs to make the right decisions about when to shoot—and when to hold fire.

Then the author describes concrete examples of such an agenda. Apart from humvee's and the Dragon fire I described earlier, there are interesting ideas about how militaries took advantage of reshuffling existing "non-MacGyver"civilians devices:

• outdoor gear
• tactical communication with augmented ipaqs: rugged, waterproof, networked

:

• waterproof laptops

Why do I blog this? another relevant column about artifacts transfered from one context to another.

Eric Von Hippel: Democratizing Innovation

Eric Von Hippel'sDemocratizing Innovation is downloadable on his webpage. According to the book description seen on Amazon:

In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.

The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products -- most notably in the free and open-source software movement -- but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive.

Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses -- the custom semiconductor industry is one example -- that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for.

One of the latest take on user-centered innovation, good to get it as a Creative Common pdf file :)

Three hidden factors shaping the innovation environment are guns, games, and style

Read in Business Week:

Where will innovation come from? That's always on the minds of those whose livelihood depends, directly or indirectly, on information technology. (...) In today's technology industry, the three hidden factors shaping the innovation environment are guns, games, and style.

"Guns" means the military and the vast associated intelligence and homeland security apparatus. From battling distributed global terror networks to providing soldiers with real-time information on the battlefield, the military faces a plethora of challenges that call for cutting-edge technology. (...) Something similar is happening in the gaming world. Computer games are a big business, rivaling the movie industry in revenues.(...) Massive, multiplayer virtual worlds, such as EverQuest, The Sims Online, and World of Warcraft, collectively have tens of millions of regular users, who put as much, if not more, stress on their technical infrastructure as customers on eBay (EBAY ) or Amazon.com (AMZN ). It's no accident that perhaps the world's most sophisticated microprocessor, the Cell chip developed jointly by IBM (IBM ), Toshiba, and Sony (SNE ), was designed primarily for gaming. Games are also creating new markets in their wake. Online transactions in "virtual assets"...(...)

Style, the third element, may seem particularly incongruous in a technology discussion. Yet it's an ever more significant driver of innovation. As the IT industry matures, raw technical specifications become less important. The baseline level of functionality is usually good enough. That puts a premium on aesthetics, buzz, usability, and other "soft" factors.

Well what about sex? It might be the 4th drivin factor?

Nice conference at EPFL to attend

"Democratizing Innovation" by Professor Eric von Hippel (MIT)The discussion will be introduced by Professor Christopher Tucci (EPFL) Where: ODYSSEA Building, EPFL When: May 2, from 17:00 to 18:30 (with reception to follow) Eric von Hippel is Professor and Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Most influential things and designers nowadays

ICON magazine has a good review of the 21 most influential people who are changing the contemporary design landscape and products, organisations and ideas that everyone will be copying in the immediate future:

Ikea is first...then it's Rapid prototyping, Easyjet, Milan, Design Academy Eindhoven...Alice Rawsthorne, Copying, Bouroullec Brothers, Blogs, Midsummer Light, Light Transmitting Concrete, the Readymade, South Korea, Rei Kawakubo, Ora Ito, Naoto Fukasawa, Entropy, Nintendo DS, Dunne & Raby, Murray Moss and Yves Behar.

Pretty europeans + asians as it seems when it's about citing people. But the trends (blog, copy, rapid prototyping) are much more transnational/occidental. I think this classification is a bit too... cosy, it needs more dirty/rebel stuff as claimed by Laurie Anderson about virtual environment at that time ("let's put dirt in virtual reality"). I mean I/we are interested into how people hack objects, find tricks or to re-use situationist terminology "détourne" artifacts. I would have definitely added "détournement" as an influential trend!

Design for Future Needs

I stumbled across this nice project this morning: Design for Future Needs. It's a EU project that aimed at discovering how designers' methods (to look into the future to meet people’s needs) can be transfered to policy makers.

The project, ran for the European Commission by a group of European design and business organisations, has researched how design techniques for envisioning the future can benefit EC decision-makers’ foresight planning and policy work. The project is aiming to help them respond to emerging issues and trends from environmental pressures to technological change.

The final report is here (.pdf).It's very well documented with good introduction on foresight and design. The most interesting parts IMO are the case studies:

• Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5: it looks at the development of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in the UK. The study looks at what lessons we can learn about where and how to site airports and what technologies and environments will make it easier for everyone involved with air travel.
• Humantec 'Reflexive Spaces': Humantec examines how changing working patterns will demand the development of different forms of office and home furniture in the next decade. If we spend more time working at home, how will our houses look? Will we need more “multi-function” furniture to cope with our different roles? As the technology in our offices has changed, office furniture has often been slow to catch up. Wireless technologies in development today may get rid of the cabling curled beneath our desks, but will unwieldy chairs and desks still tether us to one place?
• Whirlpool "Project F": the case study aims to understand forecasting techniques’ role in the development of products ad services by focusing on two recent Whirlpool research projects. One looked at the needs of couples in various European countries to build up a picture of domestic life, and the other explored customer preferences in relation to the laundry process.
• Decathlon: The case study looks at design forecasting techniques and their impact on the New Product Development process, as well as considering how design can be used as a forecasting tool.

Dartfish, Logitech, Swissquote and co.

Yesterday I read this book: DARTFISH, LOGITECH, SWISSQUOTE ET CO. «Les transformeurs IT, les nouveaux acteurs du changement» by Xavier Comtesse and other people. It's about innovation, startup experiences in Switzerland. It's very easy to read. The claim of the author is that Switzerland has a powerful R&D but it often failed at turning this into concrete outcome/experiences/products/success stories. The most interesting part of the book presents various companies with different experiences, ranging from successfull startups (Dartfish, Swissquote) to state-owned elephant (swisscom and ascom who failed becoming telco giants) or big bluchip (logitech which works pretty good). They also advocate for the advent of a new type of company they called "transformers" that do not try to replicate already existing business (like selling books online) but innovate in creating a new end-user experience. Another relevant point is their willingness to put forward the notion of "end-user innovation" which does not seem so obvious to swiss engineer much more focused on designing nice and precise solutions for specific problems (but not so targeted to end-users). They then advocate for more marketing and user-centric innovation.

Nice book to understand more about the innovation topic in Switzerland :) Summary here (thanks hannes).