Earlier this week music composer/producer Brian Eno and computer game composer/producer Will Wright met in San Francisco as part of The Long Now Foundation’s ongoing series of talks. It was one of the most enlightening, jovial, and entertaining talks I’ve seen in a long time. Wright joked about the fact that LNF flubbed the date in its promotional materials (“Friday, June 26th” - it could be Friday or the 26th, not both), since LNF’s “sole charter is to think about time.”

To call it a “talk” or a “lecture” is to not really do it justice. It was more like a conversation between old friends, though the two hardly knew each other, it seems, outside their respective creations. For a while I thought Wright was humoring Eno, but he obviously had a long-term familiarity with Eno’s work, and offered his own insights and interpretations of it that were clearly not off the cuff. Much the same was true of Eno.

It quickly emerged that there were strong parallels between their individual efforts, the common thread being using small sets of simple rules to generate unpredictable complexity. Wright demo’d his new game, Spore, while Eno played ad hoc music in the background and the two bantered back and forth.

Spore is stunning in its scope and audacity, literally having a whole universe with millions of worlds that players create and can then move between. He showed the effortless and visually stunning ways that one creates new creatures and how the game automatically modifies their movements and behaviors based on the arbitrary combinations of body parts the user selects. He quipped “I’ve just done in three minutes what a Pixar animator takes a week to do,” full knowing that several Pixar animators would have been in the audience.

The talk helped crystalize some things I’ve been thinking about with wicked problems, and issues of emergence and how one can use seeds (in Eno’s words) to generate and test ideas, rather than trying to build forests. This is a key aspect of dealing with wicked problems: rapid iterations of probing and testing to further understand the problem. Haven’t finished thinking it through yet, but some lightbulbs went off.

Steve Portigal also has a writeup. I largely agree with what he says: “This was the best presentation I have ever seen. My brain was just ready to explode about a million times.”

You can get a longer summary and mp3 on the Long Now website.

“When we have a World Championship, we invite teams from other countries.”

    - John Cleese, on the difference between England and America

I just got my ID Magazine Annual in the mail a couple of days ago, the one that has their annual design competition in it. A rather lacklustre year this year, I have to say. Nothing really knocked my socks off.

One thing that was striking, however, was the parochialness of the competition. For a magazine that claims the title of the “international design magazine”, the review is hardly international. Of the products in the “consumer” category, 25 of the 35 clients/manufacturers are US-based, and 22 of the design firms (including in-house groups) are US-based. The remainders are sprinkled across Canada, Korea, Taiwan, France, Sweden, Brazil, UK, Netherlands and Japan, mostly one each. Most of the other categories are similarly skewed, with furniture being the sole exception.

But then look at the list of jurors and moderators. This chart shows where they were drawn from.

 

Does it look a little east coast centric? Only one juror from west of the Mississippi, Doug Patton in Irvine. Not a single non-US-based juror (though a couple of European connections). Now don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of design and writing talent in NY, but it’s no means the center of the universe. A little broader perspective would go a long way.

 

Jeff Veen has a dead-on article on his blog about the mess of the airline industry and how that bubbles up to the carrier websites and the ticket purchasing experience. Like any poorly designed, silo’d industry, you can see their org charts in the way they handle you as a customer and in the services they provide.

He (and the commenters to the post) lament how poor the websites are for the airlines, and primitive the experiences are for the crucial ticket-buying experience. Just about every airline and third party site (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, etc.) look and operate in almost exactly the same way. Can you tell which is which in the composite above?

Airlines are not alone in having high levels of technical, organizational, financial, and political complexity which then get exposed to the customer. The medical industry is just the same, if not worse, as I wrote about in another post. Cellphone providers are somewhat similar. But last time I bought a cellphone I was struck by how much easier and pleasant it was to find what I wanted and purchase it through Amazon than it was from T-Mobile themselves. So it can be solved.

A few weeks ago I was turned on to Kayak by my colleague Nicholas Kim at work. It does about as a nice a job as anyone out there of the mechanics of the purchase process, in particular acknowledging the fluidity of the process as you try out different times, days, routes and airlines to find the best price. Though the aesthetics leave something to be desired, they have great features like dynamic sliders that allow you to adjust departure windows without having to do a full refresh on the page. This greatly speeds up winnowing your schedule/price combo. It also does realtime disambiguation of similar city/airport names, instead of forcing an interstitial page that is a huge road bump on the way to getting your airfare.

Even though the airlines really need to figure this problem out to prevent continue erosion of direct sales and syphoned off profits, my guess is that it’s going to be a smaller, more nimble third party player (who is fighting a multi-flank battle of their own, but who is focused on this one goal) that will solve the problem first. Because they don’t have the organizational baggage of the airlines themselves, they can get out of their own way and create a smoother experience for the customer. If they can crack this, and presumably treat it not simply as booking a flight but preparing for an entire trip (and I’m talking going beyond offering car/hotel bundles here), then they will dis-intermediate the airlines even further, and speed them along the way to being high priced taxis that they’ve already started to become. (Once taxi’s start giving you peanuts, they’ll be at parity.) Certainly if you look at Delta’s revamped site, which I did a test purchase on to see what it was like after it was hyped in the NY Times article that Jeff refers to, they’ve got a long way to go.

I was reading an old history book the other day (the quite delightful A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich, which is intended for children but is great for adults to read to, and is available for the first time in English) and came across this fascinating tidbit about the famous Oracle at Delphi:

But it wasn’t only the Olympic Games that brought all the Greeks together. There was another sactuary which they all held sacred. This one was at Delphi, and belonged to the sun god Aollo, and there was something most peculiar about it. As sometimes happens in volcanic regions, there was a fissure in the ground from which vapour issued. If anyone inhaled it, it literally clouded their mind. It was as if they were drunk or delirious, and nothing they said made any sense.

The very meaningless of these utterances seemed deeply mysterious to the Greeks, who said that ‘the god himself speaks through a mortal mouth’. So they had a priestess - whom they called Pythia - sit overy the fissure on a three-legged stool, while other priests interpreted her babble as predicitons of the future…. The answer they received was often far from clear, and could be understood in a variety of ways.

These days we tend to interpret the word “oracle” as meaning a predictor of the future, not an interpreter of it. But there are many ways over the centuries that humans have found to use random-ness to help them interpret the future, or envision a different future, not simply try to predict it. Astrology, tarot cards, tea-leaf reading and even fortune cookies are but a few examples.

At frog we have a set of brainstorming tools we call frogTHINK, and many of these are explicitly designed to introduce this same type of imbalance, and to force interpretation through ambiguity and mental dischord. By forcing people to think of new ideas based on certain random stimuli it opens up new channels of thought that have previously been closed due to habits of conventional thinking.

This is perhaps an under-appreciated aspect of doing scenario planning. Scenario planners typically make several different scenarios each having different outcomes and different indicators, but there is still a tendancy on the recipient’s side to treat them as predictions rather than interpretations and tools for seeing the world in a new light.

And scenarios can also be used to envision possible future states that are meant to “pull” one along rather than be linear projections of existing “pushing” forces. In this sense they are disruptive to conventional thought patterns, and may open up new possibilities. It is the fact that they are vague in the first place that makes them useful. If they were more direct, their value would be diminished as they would leave less room for imagination.

The Motorola Q is the most anticipated phone since the Razr, and while the hardware has lived up to the hype, it appears the total package is somewhat of a let-down. I’m personally a bit bummed by this as I was rather lusting over the Q when I saw it in pictures and then very recently in person. It’s a beautiful product, but one that is saddled with a clunky interface. I haven’t thought this well enough through yet to know if it’s a universal law, but it seems like experience design is like a chain, it’s only as good as its weakest link. The weaknesses only highlight how close the strengths have come to achieving greatness. Unfortunately it appears the Q has missed nirvana.

Sun Microsystems slogan for years has been “The Network is the Computer”, and in that vein my new mantra is “The System is the Product”. For a product to feel harmonious the user, the system that surrounds it must be harmonious. No product is outside of a system, though not all products are systems. A table is not a system, but it lives within a system of retail, advertising, brand, web, and customer service that must harmoniously come together for the customer in order for that table to be successfully sold.

Making systems harmonious is difficult, which gets manifested most obviously in difficult-to-use products that are schizophrenic in their behaviors. (And as evidenced by the jabs being aimed at Motorola, it’s the company that makes the physical product that seems to take the heat even for problems that are obviously not in its domain, in Q’s case for OS-based issues.)

As Steve Portigal observes:

 

Award-winning, or attractive industrial design is achievable. Usable, joyous, lovely software is achievable. Why is the combination so damn hard? When will companies figure out how to do better? As advanced as we think we are in these fields, it seems big companies are still launching stuff that wrecks your life while making you look hip. We can blame it on organizational silos, or increasingly complex design problems as screen sizes gets smaller and usage gets more advanced, but I think there’s a cultural problem (of course) in organizations, as they still don’t get it. They aren’t figuring out how to work together and they aren’t setting high enough standards for what’s good enough to launch.Sure, this is Motorola in this article, but the story seems so familiar, this could be anyone. I don’t propose simple solutions here, but I do feel so very tired of the problem.

 

And in this day and age it seems strange the sophisticated products could still be created by people who seem to never actually use them. At least, what other conclusion is one expected to reach after reading David Pogue’s comments comparing frequent tasks on the Q to the Treo? To whit:

Example 1: After you take a picture with the camera, what options would you want to be immediately available? Maybe Save, Send and Delete? Not on this phone. These options are all hiding in menus; activating Send, for example, requires four more button presses. (On the Treo: one.)

Example 2: What if you want to edit an entry in your address book? Hey — it could happen. You can’t just highlight a name, open the menu, and choose Edit; there’s no Edit command. Instead, Microsoft wants you to open that address book “card” first and then open the menu. Total steps: four. (Treo: two.)

Example 3 (this one is really annoying): Q comes with about 25 preinstalled programs: Tasks, Voice Notes, Internet Explorer, Solitaire and so on. You get to them by pressing a button labeled Start, a riff on the familiar Windows Start menu. If only it really were a menu! Instead, you see jumbo icons. Only six of them fit on the screen at once (three across, two rows). If you want a program on the last row, you have to scroll seven times, pausing each time to make sure you haven’t overshot, by pressing the down-arrow key (or turning the notched thumbwheel). Why no list-view option? Better yet, why can’t you type the first letter of the program you want, as on the Treo? On the Q, that whole alphabet keyboard just sits there, wasted.

Example 4: To reschedule an appointment, you exit Week or Month view (where only gray blocks appear); scroll to the appointment’s name in a list; press Enter; press Edit; scroll to the Starting Time box; switch the keyboard into number-typing mode; type a new number; click Done. (On the Treo, you just drag the appointment to a new time slot.)

Examples 5, 6, 7: The Q phone doesn’t auto-capitalize names you enter in the address book, auto-format phone numbers with parentheses and dashes, or put apostrophes into words like “cant,” “dont” and “Im.” Why has Moto/Microsoft deliberately ignored the accumulated wisdom of rivals?

He goes on to list other misses, like no copy/paste (!) and no ability to edit Office documents, you can only view them. And while the Q is priced for the masses (sort of) at $199, it’ll typically cost you $110/month for the broadband wireless network to run it on, which is pretty much the only reason to buy it in the first place.

It just goes to show that even when someone’s provided a good recipe (as Palm and Blackberry have), baking a good cake is still elusive, especially when one company is making the sponge and another is making the frosting (though the Treos pull this off much more harmoniously). I’ll ask again, once more with feeling, if Palm got it right ten years ago, why are we still suffering?