Last night I went to this event:

IDEO: Using Design to Build Ventures and Bring New Offerings into the World

Presented by Ryan Jacoby & Albert Lee, Directors, IDEO New York

Wednesday, April 27th from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm. Complimentary beer and wine will be provided.

Join IDEO for a conversation to discuss the ways in which design and designers are working in the overlap of technology and entrepreneurship. Ryan and Albert will share stories about how IDEO in New York is using design to not only build products and services, but also new ventures.

 

This was a brief overview (via slideshow) detailing their design thinking process and outlining a few ways IDEO has applied this process over an impressively wide range of products, services and industries. The core of their method involves gathering contextualized research to inform design. That is, they start from the premise that context and sequence are the most important factors in how products and services are employed in the world, and the traits (abstracted out via big N tables and survey methods) of the people using them are, at most, secondary and often a hinderance. Their method is refreshingly anti-psychological. Additionally, the case studies Ryan and Albert showed focused closely upon what might be called mundane rituals of everyday life.

 

The interesting anthropological takeaway came in the Q&A session when the two IDEO leads had to field a few objections to their work along the lines of: Given that you have 5 people on what grounds should we believe your "insights" are in any way reliable or valid predictors of what people will do? This is the most common objection to ethnographic work and is always a source of hand wringing when it is inevitably asked. Their answer was simple and effective. We take the "insight" and make something with it, then we see if people use it. Even the most hard core big N people were swayed by the simple logic embedded in the prototype's quasi-experimental design.

 

Their answer indexes an important line of response for anybody contemplating applied/practicing/public anthropology. A similar line of work in a more academic vein has been opened here: http://chokobar.wordpress.com/

 

1) Walk on the right side.
2) Remember to wear socks and shoes, no sandals.
3) Dark polo shirt over light colored short pants for summer walking.
4) Don't forget to smile.
5) Watch for the gigantic arrows.
6) If there are no arrows then rainbows will provide direction.

Words of wisdom from Lego. If your business is dependent on the way blocks fit together then your priority is to "Preserve the Clutch Power".

I spent some time this summer following a Toy Design workshop. I'll have more to say about it over the next few months as I dig in a little deeper through my data.

After following the mini-firestorm Don Norman brewed up with his essay http://jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html there remain a couple important points I think both Norman and his critics missed.

1) What Norman touches on is the difference between a scientist and a tinkerer. Norman's point that tools take on a life of their own, and are transformed AFTER creation, is powerful and, I think, correct.

2) But, tools aren't created in a vacuum. Norman appeals to "technology" as if it stands outside time and society, which it very clearly cannot do.

The difference Norman sketches between scientist and tinkerer isn't the absolute distinction he would like to make. The difference is, as Levi-Strauss pointed out in The Savage Mind, one of degree. Norman's "inventor" may have a larger inventory of conceptual and concrete tools to work with than Norman's "consumer", but he is, nevertheless, constrained by finite resources and limited choices in the same manner as the "consumer".

And I would beg to differ that scientists and engineers do not engage in what could be termed "design research", they do, but they call it something else. There is a lot of observation in a moment of inspiration. It wouldn't hurt them to be more systematic about their observations up front.

Tool Use: Who Works Who?

   I don't want to use Word, Pages, Open Office or any WP. These are vestiges of the command and control origins of computing with the emphasis firmly on uniformity of work flow. The are two parts to a WP-ing document 1) Content 2) Form. These are intermingled to such an extent that it is almost impossible to escape the structure imposed by the WP. This is handy for enforcing memo standards across cubicle America, but lousy for collaborating on academic work.

   Example Problem: At yesterday's meeting we discussed various sections of the library report (which has now grown to 5 authors spread over two rural counties) such as; Who should be responsible for which particular sections (and the sundry housekeeping tasks). Of course, this inevitably brings up the more onerous question: Who is responsible for keeping the single document up to date and disseminating the changes as they are incorporated?

   What happens: Dissemination is done irregularly at odd intervals and usually under deadline duress, thus leaving the collaborators in the dark for long stretches. I think this is as much the fault of the WP as any person. There is simply no easy way to institute distributed versioning or to make changes visible to everyone all the time. Only the lead author knows exactly where the document is at any given point - thus turning the lead into a de facto corporate-style micro manager.

  A few starting points towards a solution: 1) I do not want to mix typesetting and type. 2) I do want to share text via email or a version control system. 3) ASCII is still the universal format being flexible, lightweight, and easily adaptable, so whatever tool we use must deal primarily in ASCII. 4) I want to move documents from informal beginnings towards more (or less)formal endings.

 A document which would allow TODOs and/or Agenda items to be interactively embedded directly into the document would be an added bonus. In addition the ability to tag sections of the document with tags we define would also be a great help.

 (Re)Opening the Black Box:

   I will borrow an idea from Jefferson and stake out my task as looking to the middle landscape of digital tools. Tools which are neither overly constraining nor so flexible that the learning curve is too time consuming to ascend. There exists no gentle way to drop the WP. It requires getting your hands dirty and actively re-working some tools. This means lifting the hood and playing with minor amounts of code and configuration settings. Is this hard? Yes, but the minor amount of pain caused by configuration and coding is nothing when compared to the daily indignities heaped upon me by WORD.

   I have, with help from some programming friends, arrived at a more flexible setup that allows me to divorce myself completely of the WP game (except for something to open the annoying .doc and .docx files). The set up consists of three tools which play nicely with each other, and whatever else I may CHOOSE to use, plus allow me share as much or as little as I wish.

   Org-Mode
  I have settled on org-mode as my new all purpose writing tool. Org-mode is an Emacs major mode, so it has the advantages of having full access to the power (while abstracting out most of the complexity) of Emacs. Org-Mode is a handy outliner, note taker, and drafting tool (creates tables, etc...) .It exports to html, LaTex, and so forth. It Integrates with R - for the Quantitators and/or data hipsters amongst us- and most of all org-mode provides a gentle ramp for starting documents informally and incrementally adding layers of formality as the document moves towards completion or abandonment.

 http://orgmode.org/
http://orgmode.org/worg/
http://orgmode.org/GoogleTech.html

   Git
  Distributed Version control. Designed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Kernel development is essentially a large writing project involving a few hundred authors spread out worldwide.

 Just a few of the pressing questions that Git can elegantly answer:

 1) See changes over time - Where are we going? Where have we been?
2) Who has made changes? Why? Should I cut off contributor X?
3) How can I roll back the changes I don't like?
4) Can we branch this and spawn a new paper?

 http://git-scm.com/
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/

  Dropbox

   Dropbox installs as a local folder and, unlike most web based file sharing solutions, holds local copies of documents. When combined with GIT this makes an ideal distributed version control system for files under 2gb.

 http://www.getdropbox.com/

 ** Getting Git to work with Dropbox

 http://www.cimgf.com/2008/06/03/version-control-makes-you-a-better-programmer/

The other day I had a conversation with a friend about the suddenness, intensity and lunacy of the birthers and the town hall health care protesters. Yeah...what can you really say about all that?
 
As it turns out, not much, so here is Richard Hofstadter's article published in Harper's on eve of the 1964 election.
 
 
Some Highlights:
 
The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and
independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not
merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American
power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to
be betrayal from on high.
 
 
Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original
conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the
consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual
machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that
it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to
develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but
circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he
resists enlightenment.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only
by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

Our panel, Practicing Anthropology in the Shelves, was accepted by the AAA. Here are the gory details: http://theanthrogeek.com/2009/08/05/practicing-anthropology-in-the-shelves-de...

 To riff on the conference theme (The Ends of Anthropology) I have returned to the raw data we simmered with Atlas.ti and stewed it into....well.....something other than Anthropology.

 Here is the rough procedure:

 1) From the raw fieldnotes and interview transcriptions we used Atlas.ti to create indexes and a handful of codes

 2) I ran the codes through Nodebox using the Flowerwolf and Linguistics library.

 3) Voila! The pataphorical end of anthropology.

 http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home

Since the Purdue Sociology department broke the link to this rare work I will host it here. If you are at all interested in EM/CA this is a treasure trove. Enjoy.

The pdf is too large to display properly inline, however at the bottom of the frame is a link to the pdf, which you can download.