Off Course-On Target

Redesigning Rather Than Crying Over Spilled Milk?

On a recent trip back to the USA for a few weeks, I noticed something new in the dairy section of the grocery store—a new milk container. The milk was the same, but the container was completely new—square in shape and made from recyclable plastic. A quick search online produced all the details, such as this NY Times article “Solution, or Mess? A Milk Jug for a Green Earth” and revealed what I thought was another great example of the rising role and increasing importance of design for a bright future. 

As I looked into this story of these new milk containers, I was struck by:

• The simply staggering improvements that were realized by a relatively simple redesign of the everyday milk container
• The role that consumers need to play in both the design process and the successful implementation of these changes into mass usage.

For those who have not seen these new containers, here is a quick overview:

• More efficient storage; new jugs store 50% more milk by volume and are stackable.  More milk can be shipped per truck and requires less refrigerated storage.  One retailer now stores 224 gallons of milk in the same space that used to hold 80.   Combined these reduce fuel and energy use dramatically.
• Does not require crates or racks for shipping and storage due to its stackable, flat-top design.
• With no crates to wash or transport, labor is cut by half (loading, returning, washing) and water usage is reduced by 60 to 70 percent. One dairy mentioned in the NYT article was using 100,000 gals of water per day just for washing crates!
• More milk per truck and with no crates to haul back, the number of truck trips to the store has been reduced from 5 per week to just 2, which is a major fuel saving, and it lowers the overall cost of milk 10 to 20 cents per gallon.
• Overall efficiency is increased; milk from the cow in the morning is on the store shelves by afternoon. When I was young I spent many summers on my uncle’s dairy farm and always long for the taste of truly fresh milk.

To summarize, these new milk jugs result in cheaper, fresher milk that requires much less energy, water and labor and is better for the environment.

Creating a better world through a different design approach

This example also gives me even more confidence and optimism that we can create a better world through a balanced approach that benefits all those involved in the entire cycle—from initial idea to design to production, consumption and recycling.

Has to be an instant success, right?  Not quite. The real challenge may well be our ability as milk consumers to adapt to these new containers, to UNlearn some of our ingrained habits, such as how we  do something as basic as pouring milk from a container. It turns out that many people spill some milk when they first try to pour from these new containers. Why? Because they try to pour milk the way they are used to doing it. Many people end up rejecting these new containers and go back to purchasing the older style of containers. To address this problem, some stores are even offering in store lessons on how to pour with no spills—by tilting the jug forward rather than lifting it up, a technique described as "rock-and-pour instead of a lift-and-tip."

Spilled milk is clearly frustrating and wasteful, but rather than crying over it (sorry , couldn’t resist), the solution would appear to be twofold:  short term this appears to be a good example of one of my favorite themes of unlearning and relearning how to pour milk from these new containers without spilling and longer term, I suspect that there are additional design improvements that will make these containers even more spill proof and easy to use.

I think there is also a larger lesson to be learned from this example. I have to imagine that if a more holistic approach had been taken by involving consumers in the design process, the new containers would have been easier or more intuitive to use without spilling.

Maybe I’m just being my hyperbolic self and I’m seeing more than there really is, but I don’t think so. Look at some of these numbers and start multiplying them by the amount of milk consumed every day around the world. Seems like an amazing improvement to me, and all from a relatively straightforward rethinking and redesign of an everyday item.

Tapping into the "Prosumer" model

There is a lot of talk these days about the environment, being green, sustainability and so on, most of which is well intentioned and much needed.  However, it seems to me that these changes are often implemented along the lines of the historical roles for consumers and producers where the producers come up with the ideas, make the changes, and the role of consumers is to buy and use these new and improved products.  Not a bad model necessarily and one capable of producing good results as the new milk jug attests. However I’m advocating the need for a more “prosumer” and  collaborative approach to design where we are simultaneously producers and consumers. 

The term prosumer  was first coined by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their 1980 book “The Third Wave” where they predicted what I think we are now seeing—a society where the previously separate roles and responsibilities are increasingly being combined or “mashed up”  to create a very new and different role for all of us.

I see a distinct trend towards a prosumer society where all of us will play an increasing role in the design process of everything around us. Keeping in mind that pretty much everything in our world that isn’t living matter has to be designed and built by us, this has very major implications for all of us and the world we inhabit.This is a theme I’ll be expanding on more in upcoming articles and podcasts here on OCOT.

More than anything else though, this new milk jug example has me pondering what other everyday items besides the lowly milk container could produce similarly staggering results. What if we were to look at them more closely and rethink the design and unlearn some of our habits for using them?  Packaging alone is an enormous area ripe for major improvement, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of benefits to be had from redesigning and rethinking our current products and practices. 

How about you?  Look around your home, office, car, or other places you frequently inhabit and try seeing using a newly critical eye to see what opportunities you can find. You don’t need to have a degree in design nor have it appear on your business card or job description to be a designer. All it takes is adopting a more critical and new look at everyday things, thinking differently and thinking about seeing anew those things we take for granted. Who would have thought that something as basic and “unimportant” as a milk container could produce such staggering improvements?  Let’s hear some ideas from the rest of us about what should be next in line for such redesign.

Future Sources of Innovation, Discovery and Design?

Perhaps it is just a case of seeing what I want to, but I seem to be finding more and more evidence to support my long-term prediction that for the next few decades at least, we will find that one of the greatest sources of innovation, new ideas, and inspiration will be the developing regions of the world. This is due to:

• The benefit of starting with a a clean slate and having no pre-existing infrastructures, customs, and behaviors to overcome.
• The driving force of necessity, which, as the saying goes, is "the mother of invention".
• The fact that creativity and innovative thinking lies within all 6.6 billion of us on the planet! 

Whatever the reasons though, I think we all have a great deal to learn and benefit from these often overlooked and unexpected sources.

Amazing Afrigadget (www.afrigadget.com)

The most recent example of one such fabulous source of innovation and invention is called Afrigadget. Thanks to Kelly Rupp, my champion at Autodesk, and Jeff Wilk at TenCue for the link.

I highly recommend you check out some of the fascinating postings on the AfriGadget site.  Some recent ones that I think you might find particularly worthwhile and interesting include:

• An interview with Simon Mwacharo, an entrepreneur whose small business CraftSkills, is based in Nairobi, Kenya. His business focuses on designing and building self-sustaining renewable energy projects in places that do not have access to the electric grid.
• "Powering African Schools with Toys", which is the story of a young inventor, 23-year-old Daniel Sheridan, and his vision of how children playing on a school yard teeter-totter (seesaw) could supply significant amounts of electrical energy for the area.
• A fascinating online overview with lots of great links to mobile phone solutions from another great resource, Jan Chipchase, who works for Nokia. As AfriGadget says, Jan “can best be described as a design and usability ethnographer. He explores the way mobile phones are used worldwide, and reports back to Nokia’s design team. He’s a fascinating person to talk to, and I thought I might highlight some of the stories he’s come up with while exploring in Africa.”
• The Village Phone project (by Grameen Bank) happening in Uganda. Jan has taken an excellent picture and annotated it with the important facts about this project in a rural Uganda.

  

  For more information about Jan, read this recent NY Times article, and of course, you can subscribe to his blog, Future Perfect.

Well, you get the idea, this site is just full of inspiring stories of powerful, yet often very simple, solutions coming out of Africa. I highly recommend the AfriGadget site as a worthwhile place to spend some time during your next web surfing session.

Benefiting without Eliminating?

As I noted at the start of this posting, one of the key reasons why developing regions are such a rich source of ideas and innovation is that they lack the prior use, habits, and infrastructure that are present in the more developed parts of the world. As you check out the postings on AfriGadget , consider one of the ongoing questions I ponder about all this:

How we can find a way to reap the benefits of these new discoveries, inventions, and innovations, have them spread to everyone and everywhere who could benefit, and yet not interfere or negatively change or inhibit these sources? 

The value is partly that people in these regions have not been affected by our thinking, models, assumptions, etc., and so what concerns me is how do we tap into these sources without affecting and changing them?

100 Days and it’s gone?

Perhaps we can't avoid affecting and changing them. Maybe we just want to be sure to maximize the benefits and innovation coming from these sources. This situation might benefit from a tactic I’ve long practiced with new employees, staff, or team members who join an organization that I am part of. I make it a point to meet with these new arrivals, not only to welcome them, but to tell them that for the next 100 days, they have a unique and special value to offer. Because they are new and not indoctrinated, they will see things differently than those who have been with the organization for some time. They will have different assumptions, and they will suggest different solutions to problems. My choice of 100 days is relatively random, but in the several decades I’ve been doing this, it seems to be the amount of time it takes before their newness is lost, and with it this unique and transitory value.

Of course, I am also quick to point out that this is hardly the end of their value (let’s hope!), but rather that this is the moment in time when they have a unique value to offer.  My specific recommendations are to have them ask those '”dumb questions” quite loudly and proudly, since they often serve as the spark of new thinking that leads to a better solution. I recommend that those who are around these new arrivals tap into this special value and ask the newcomers for their opinions, their perspectives, and ideas.

More commonly, new people tend to be quiet, study the situation, and assume that they won’t have as much to offer until they get “up to speed” with the norms of the organization and thinking of others, but that approach misses out on a great opportunity.

Learning from the OLPC example?

A more direct example, that I’m still pondering, is the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and similar efforts like:

• The Classmate PC, a low-cost laptop by Intel
• Digital Textbook, a South Korean project that intends to distribute tablet notebooks to elementary school students, and put computers in the hands of the masses in many developing regions. 

More specifically, I wonder whether OLPC's decision to offer only the new equipment, but no teacher training, set curriculum, guidelines, and “how to” type of information, was a “bug” or a feature?  In part, this was apparently a budget issue—no funds for such materials and programs—but as you might guess, I actually think that purposefully NOT providing this type of training and guidance will produce much more innovative uses and outcomes than if all the “experts” had provided their guidance, opinions, directions, and methods.

Les extremes se touche?

However, I believe there are ways to bridge these two extremes of providing no assistance and providing too much.  There are LOTS of parallels here to what makes for great teaching and great learning, and I’ll explore some of these themes later. But for now, sparked by the brilliant light shining out of these often overlooked sources of creativity, I want to focus our collective attention on them to see what we can learn from them, and how we might all benefit more.

I am not suggesting that these developing regions are the only sources of inspiration, innovation, and ideas, nor am I suggesting that as they become more successful, they will lose this wellspring of inspiration. Certainly human history shows otherwise.  No, I’m pondering this idea with you because I’m anxious that we pay attention to the characteristics of innovation and invention. I'd like to see us work to find more ways to increase exponentially the volume and diversity of inventions, innovation, and discovery to match this world of exponential change and its accompanying challenges that we are now living in.

I think about these questions ALOT, and so I’d like to develop them a bit further in a future post.  For now, I leave you to enjoy and benefit (I hope) from checking out Afrigadget and stimulating you to both look for more and send along some of your favorite sources of innovation, creativity, and invention, wherever they may be.

And as always I’m VERY interested in your perspectives and views. Does this match examples that you are seeing?  What are some of the best sources for innovation, invention, and ideas that you are aware of?  Think about your last "Aha!" moment, streak of creativity, or invention.  What were the conditions and the environment as this was happening?  See any common elements in these?  Or do you see any common elements that we want to avoid—those that stifle or reduce creativity?  I'm anxious to hear your comments, and I’ll be back shortly with more of my thoughts on increasing the volume and diversity of creativity in the world.

Living and Learning at the Beginning of the Cognitive Age?

The New York Times recently published an article by op-ed columnist David Brooks"The Cognitive Age" that I think is very worthwhile reading. While I have no interest in the political aspect of this piece, I do have a great deal of interest in his main point about the economic connections to skills, and about the future being one of "cognitive talent", as well as Brooks' keen observations about the connections to learning.

I've often observed that for the past few thousand years, we as humans have focused on leveraging and augmenting our physical abilities—initially with basic tools such as the lever, the wheel, pulleys, screws, etc. and then on through machines, internal combustion engines, hydraulics, electricity and robots. All of these enable us to do things we either could physically not do ourselves or give us the ability to do them faster, easier, and at greater scale. While this will likely continue for some time, my sense is that we are at the point of diminishing returns (have been for some time), and that the future (and some aspects of the present) is about putting more and more focus on leveraging and augmenting our cognitive capabilities. The most obvious example is computer technology that enables us to do things with our brains that we either could not do or now can do much faster, easier, and at greater scale. 

Of course, much has been written about the "knowledge worker", but the most common picture painted seems to be based around an office or desk job model. I think the vast majority of jobs will be elsewhere: on site, in the field, mobile, and other environments. What's more, many jobs—the majority I believe—have been categorized as skilled labor, blue collar work, and other such labels.  It's thought that these jobs will either be eliminated or relegated to low skills and low wages.

As mentioned in my previous post "Human History is Additive Not Subtractive",  these prognostications of the experts seems very much at odds with what has actually been happening. Consider everyday needs of most people for services, such as car repairs, plumbing, health care, and manufacturing. In all of these cases, we find perhaps the most amount of change. They are becoming more and more cognitive-based, rather than manual-labor-based.  While you still get your hands dirty doing many of these, it is the brain of those doing these jobs which is doing more and more of the work. Brooks points out this same kind of disparity with globalization:

"But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the world. Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does the America. William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs, 10 times more than the U.S."

The article goes on to make the key point for me:

"The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked."

I think it is also worth noting how well this matches up with and augments the astute observations that Daniel Pinks makes about the characteristics of the coming "Right Brain Economy" in his book Whole New Mind.  You can read more about this and how it ties into this same theme in my previous posting "Getting it Right".

In his blog "Connecting the Dots", Steve Borsch had a recent posting called "The Cognitive Age: Why Social Media Matters", which references Brooks' New York Times article and adds some interesting observations. He sees social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace as well as trends I've commented on previously, such as crowdsourcing (originally coined by Jeff Howe in this worthwhile article in 2006 Wired magazine), are tied into the emerging cognitive age Brooks outlines so well.

For me however, Brooks synthesizes this all down to make the most compelling point about the often misguided views of globalization with his note:

"The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called 'the Chinese' or 'the Indians,' are doing this or that.

But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy—the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. (emphasis added)

If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner."

This certainly matches up with my experiences of traveling the world and working with so many people of diverse cultures, countries, industries, and jobs. Going back to my opening comments, you can see why I was drawn to Brooks' observations that we are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, and that indeed the future is all about leveraging and augmenting our cognitive abilities. 

As Brooks notes, this all aligns very well with the need for an increased focus on learning. In some future articles, I am going to look at the flip side of the learning coin: teaching as a skill set that we will all want and need be more competent with if we are to survive and thrive in a cognitive age. 

And what do YOU think?  Does this match up with what you are seeing within your own job and practice as well as within your community, your children and your experiences with the world at large? Send in your comments, critiques, counter views or additional examples of these trends.

Is the Sky Really Falling?

I recently read the article "AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010", which is pretty much summarized by the title and the opening line:

"U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010."

You can read more in the article, although they digress into some net neutrality issues.  However, this latest prediction reminds me of similar predictions throughout history that "the end is near", and I'd like to explore them further here.

The "Limits" of Physics

I can recall back in about the late 80's when experts were making similar predictions and warnings that we had reached the upper limit of how fast data could be transferred through phone lines via modems—9600 baud! These same experts claimed that we'd reached the limits of physics and it was just a "fact" that we needed to accept. 

As we can now see (with the benefit of hindsight, of course) that entirely new materials and techniques, such as optical fibre, compression algorithms and other breakthroughs, were developed to get around some of the limits that existed for wire-based data transfer. Wikipedia has a good history of modems, bandwidth, and the inventions along the way.

It's interesting to note that these types of warnings and stories are usually accompanied by quotes from the experts and other "facts", which prove that they are "true" and inevitable.  It reminds me of this quote from a  great scene in the movie Men in Black:

"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."

BTW, you can find this quote and just about any other kind of movie-related trivia from the handy Internet Movie Database.

The "Limits" of Technology

Going much further back, dire warnings in the late 1800's said that we needed to seriously curtail the expanding use of horses, cows, and beasts of burden or else the planet would soon be covered in several feet of manure!  The experts had "done the math" and this was an inevitable and irrefutable prediction. But ooops! We didn't allow for the invention of the internal combustion engine, electrical power, and other energy sources that significantly reduced our reliance on animal-based power. Of course, we also didn't anticipate the whole new series of problems and challenges of global warming that many might argue make the manure problem look like a good one!

I sometimes have the sense that some of the more dire predictions about global warming and other imminent disasters are similarly exaggerated and misdirected. Please do NOT misconstrue my comments here to mean that we have nothing to worry about or to work on. I want to champion quite the opposite reaction!  To be sure, all of us have much to be concerned about. We need to be more diligent and work harder than ever to ensure the sustainability of ourselves and our environment so that we can ensure an ever brighter future for us all. 

The "Limits" of Human Capacity, Foresight, and Imagination

History has shown that we are capable of doing some VERY stupid things and can exhibit great ignorance and lack of foresight.  However, as illustrated by my prior examples, history also shows that we need to take into account our even greater human capacity for invention, discovery, creativity, innovation, and design.

I'm sure that many of you may have similar Chicken Little "the sky is falling" * stories, and I'd be most appreciative if you'd post these to your blogs or send comments here to help all of us learn from these historical examples.

I'm was in Mexico recently and I'm told that the story of Chicken Little (and the saying "the sky is falling") are well known there and translates to El Cielo Se Esta Cayendo. For those not familiar with this reference the previous link will give you the background.

In the end, I have huge faith in our collective powers for invention, creativity,  innovation and designing solutions. What we need to watch out for is the flip side of this where we become smug, arrogant, or cynical based on what we "know for sure" today.  I hope that examples such as this latest prediction about the limits of Internet capacity will only serve to help us balance these forces and inspire and motivate us all to work towards new ways to improve our lives and those of all others. 

Rather than imagine what we'll know for sure tomorrow, imagine if ................ Not only is the sky NOT falling, it is the limit of what is possible.

More on Mashups

Last week I was honored to do the opening keynote for the symposium on Mashups put on by the New Media Consortium.  NMC, in collaboration with Educause, recently released the 2008 version of "The Horizon Report" which is "... a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe those emerging technologies that are likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations." 

There is a full download of the Creative Commons PDF version here, which I recommend reading.  The report covers key emerging technologies, critical challenges, significant trends, and what they refer to as "Meta Trends", which have emerged after 5 years of producing The Horizon Report.

The Symposium on Mashups was a fun experience in and of itself, since the event was conducted entirely online using a parallel combination of the virtual world of Second Life and a more "traditional" online environment using Adobe Breeze. Sessions, where conducted live, lasted generally about 45 minutes with about one-third to one-half of that time devoted to dialog with participants using said audio tools.  And to add some additional uniqueness, I delivered the keynote from my "floating office" (a.k.a. the good ship Learnativity) while anchored near La Paz in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico.  I connected up via a combination of a web connection via my laptop data card and a cell phone for the audio portion.

For the past few years, I've been emphasizing and championing the power and potential that a more holistic perspective of mashups can offer, and you can refer back to some of my previous posts, such as "Mishmash of Mashups", "Mashed Up Snowflakes" and "The Future is a Monstrous & Marvelous Mashup", to get more about my views on this topic.

For this most recent opportunity with the NMC audience, I had the benefit and challenge of an audience who were very well versed on the topic and practice of mashups, but were still focusing and limiting their use of mashups to that of technology and content.  My objective was to take advantage of their expertise and experiences with mashups, and help them see how mashups can best be understood and used as an almost universal conceptual model that can be applied to almost everything and everyone.

In the slides below, I suggested that a simple definition of mashups should be something like, "A mashup is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole."

| View | Upload your own

Therefore mashups are also another powerful implementation of the LEGO block model of modularity. In the Q&A session, I highlighted the importance of understanding that mashups require the use of modules rather than raw resources.  This concept focuses on the challenge of using components that are "just right" in size by ensuring that they are as small as possible, but not one bit smaller. I suggested that, in my experience, optimum size  is when two fundamental criteria are met:

1. Each component is large enough and complete enough to exist on its own.
2. By itself, each component is too small to be useful.

For example, each LEGO block is complete and exists independent of any other block, yet any one block is unlikely to be useful all by itself.  It is therefore important to note that mashups are not the same as creating something new "from scratch".  Buildings today are largely "mashups" because over 85% of the materials used to create a building are pre-built components, such as windows, door units, light fixtures, heating and ventilation components, cupboards, etc. These are then delivered whole to the building site.  Manufactured goods such as computers and cars are no longer created in factories that build them from raw materials. Instead they are assembled from pre-existing components, such as hard drives, keyboards, engines, wheel assemblies, etc., in flexible manufacturing plants. 

We are already seeing how large shrink-wrapped software applications are being replaced by unique collections (mashups) of small modules of code in the form of widgets, utilities or the combination of two pre-existing applications, such as Google Earth and your database of places visited, pictures taken, or customers served.

Mashups have huge economies of scale and speed of creation because they are are new assemblies created from pre-existing components or "blocks". And yet, each assembly will most likely be unique, because that specific collection of components has never been assembled that way before.  Therefore mashups offer the promise of enabling truly exponential scaling and mass customization or personalization, which is at the heart of my passion about a future based on the Snowflake Effect, where everyone of us can increasingly have just the right people and things at just the right time, in just the right context, etc.

Based on the questions in the discussion segment at the end of this session, as well as the follow-on comments I've received, I think that most of the audience seemed to really understand how mashups can be and are being applied to everything from software code to events and conferences, projects and even people.  By "people", I'm referring to such things as the finding just the right combination of people for a successful project team, or the mashup of your skills, knowledge, and abilities (also known as the description of your real job!).

Now that we have more and more examples of mashups around us, I'm hoping that many more people will see this as a conceptual model, rather than any one form of implementation.  As you consider this much broader view of mashups, what applications and uses can you see?  How are you perhaps already applying the concept of mashups to a more diverse range of problems and solutions?

Getting back to the NMC keynote, I had just enough time to close out the session by telling a short version of my story about "flapping", which cautions against the trap of trying to design innovative new solutions by copying old models.  I've received a tremendous follow-up response from many of the attendees, telling how powerful this perspective was for them and how much it helped them, both in the rest of the sessions at the NMC Mashup Symposium as well as back on the job.  Please see "Confusing Flapping with Flying"  for the full story. You too can see how much you are flapping versus how much you are flying.

w
a
yne
=====

Arthur C. Clarke: Discovering the Limits of the Impossible

Today (March 19, 2008), this world lost a great mind and great person with the passing of Arthur C. Clarke.  I suspect another world gained an equal or greater amount.

While I am not personally a big science fiction reader or watcher, I have long been fascinated by and most respectful of the thinking and perspectives of Arthur C. Clarke. Although I'm sure there will be a LOT of articles and other posts on this event, his passing gives me a chance to connect you to a phenomenal resource—fellow Canadian Stephen Downes.  He is one of the most active researchers and readers I know and a prolific and talented writer—skills I admire greatly.  While our perspectives are very different, Stephen and I are usually in "heated agreement" on most things and share a common sense about the priorities in life and learning.  I highly recommend that you check out some of Stephen's many sites and resources, such as his OLDaily "Online Learning Daily" and his "Half an Hour". blog.

With a nod to Stephen for the visual and the Clarke quote he chose, (copied here), here is one of the many reasons why I have such respect for and resonance with Arthur C. Clarke.

And you will also understand my sentiments when you read this Wired article about him, where they remember that when asked by Wired in 1993 if he had put any thought into what he would want on his epitaph, Clarke said he had:

"Oh, yes," he said. "I've often quoted it: 'He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.'"

May we all strive to find this often tricky balance between staying young at heart and in mind, yet constantly growing and "getting better at getting better"** as Doug Engelbart so concisely put it.  Sure helps to guide me through my journey in life.

Thanks Arthur!  You will be sorely missed but never forgotten.

** Marcia Conner and Erik Duval, two of my other favorite people,  also like and often use this Engelbart notion of getting better at getting better.

Getting it Right

On Oct. 16th, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote called "Getting it Right" to the Autodesk Bay Area Manufacturing User Group or BAMUG. I was matched with fellow Autodesker Jay Tedeschi, who followed me on the stage and did a great job of putting my big picture and long range views into very clear context for these manufacturing design professionals. You can read more from Jay on his blog "The Gear Box".

My reference to "right" was two-fold:

• First, it refers to mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect: getting just the right stuff, to just the right people, at just the right time, in just the right context, in just the right ..........
• Secondly, it refers to the shift of human skills and value to right brain dominant skills and abilities.

As the slides below show the main topics I covered, including:

• How to avoid the "Perfecting the Irrelevant" syndrome
• The Snowflake Effect
• Skills of the future moving to the right side of the brain
• Applying the Long Tail to design
• The future of design

| View | Upload your own

Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure to be with Dan Pink and will have more on our meeting in a future posting. Dan is the author of one of my top recommended books right now "A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future" and I've been using his observations frequently. 

In this presentation to the BAMUG, I noted the connections between Dan's thought on the future of right brain skills and how this ties directly to design. For example as Dan notes in A Whole New Mind:

“...businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today's overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent, physically beautiful and emotionally compelling." or as Dan also puts it, "the MFA is the new MBA“

MFA = Master of Fine Arts

MBA = Master of Business Administration

Given that the everyone in the audience at this BAMUG meeting were mechanical engineers (or other design professionals in the manufacturing industry), I pointed out how dramatic the effect of this shift will be on them individually and their professions. 

Their jobs and skill sets have traditionally been focused on very left brain activities, such as analysis, and these are the very things that are becoming increasingly automated by the software they are using. 

I was able to show how Computer Aided Design or CAD programs that this audience uses, such as Autodesk AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor, have been increasingly automating more and more of these left brain skills—reducing or eliminating the time the designer needs to spend looking after them. Therefore the role of the engineer or user of these programs is to look after increasingly more right-brain dominant activities, such as synthesis, seeing patterns, making bigger picture design choices, and problem solving. 

Quite contrary to some of the dark bleak visions of the future predicted by futurists and science fiction writers, in which humans would be relegated to menial tasks and the "machines" would be doing all the "thinking" and be very "intelligent", a very different and very bright future is emerging—one where there is more reliance and focus on the role of the human brain to deal with these very right-brain-oriented skills of recognizing patterns amidst the chaos, seeing the bigger picture, developing holistic solutions, etc.

Meanwhile, the computers and machines are looking after more of the left-brain skills of analysis, and sorting through immense numbers of possibilities. Both sides of the brain and both sides of the human/machine relationship are very necessary. From where I sit, we are seeing a steady migration and matching of which side does what. 

The only danger I can see, and it is a very real and growing one, is to miss this shift to the right and miss the chance to be both more human and more valuable than ever. 

I'll come back to this theme of the shift to the right in future postings. For now, check out some of Dan's points, take a step back, and assess how this trend is affecting your job, your industry and your brain. Just the act of doing so is a great way to exercise the right side of your brain—so limber up, you've got everything to gain.

w
a
yne
=====

del.icio.us tags: Autodesk, Inventor, AutoCAD, mechanical, engineer, right brain, left brain, whole new mind, Dan Pink, exponential change, BAMUG, CAD

Technorati tags: Autodesk, Inventor, AutoCAD, mechanical, engineer, right brain, left brain, whole new mind, Dan Pink, exponential change, BAMUG, CAD

Memories of Philip Dodds: We've Lost a Great Navigator, but Not Our Way

It was a sad weekend for me and many others as we received the news on Saturday morning that Phil Dodds had slipped away peacefully after a long and valiant battle with cancer.

It has taken me awhile to be able to write this, but I join the many others who share in the wide range of emotions and memories invoked by thinking of Phil. 

Referencing one of Phil's many claims to fame when he starred as a young man in the classic movie "Close Encounters of a Third Kind",  (center person in the screenshot from the movie), Elliott Masie wrote this typically thoughtful message:

"What are we saying to each other?"

That was a single line, spoken by the sound engineer at the end of Close Encounters of a Third Kind, as he played chords and a friendly alien spaceship played music back.

The role was played by a young sound engineer who was spotted by Steven Spielberg and given the on-screen role as the interface between these two worlds. That man, Philip Dodds, was still young and inventive, when he passed away this Saturday morning.

Philip Dodds was the Chief Architect of SCORM and the force behind sharable and reusable content. He was deeply involved in the evolution of interactive multimedia and expanding the possibilities for learning via technology.

If you use a Learning Management System, author an interactive learning module, or talk about the future of Web 2.0, take a moment to thank a man who you probably never met. Philip's work was KEY and CRITICAL to the exciting world of learning, knowledge management, and collaboration that we take for granted.

Philip's dreams were to create a global set of standards and specifications that would allow content to be searchable, reusable, and expandable.

Philip, we thank you for all that you have done, and we'll keep asking that question: "What are we saying to each other?"

With respect and sadness,

Elliott Masie

For those of you who knew Phil well and are feeling a bit melancholy, as Tom King put it, you may want to head over to this thread that Tom started on Phil on the AICC blog. Phil may be most publicly remembered as "the father of SCORM" or Shareable Content Object Reference Model but there is so much more that Phil accomplished, and Tom kindly provided links to some of many other ways that Phil left his imprint on this world. As Tom reflected in a recent e-mail, "perhaps reading the comments will be a bit uplifting for you too." Please add your memories of Phil to the thread as well, and here are a few of mine:

My Memories of Phil Dodds:

I remember all those late night and early morning meetings working on what Phil usually referred to as "the devil is in the details" and his quips about "working code trumps all theories". 

While many of these meetings were held in conjunction with a standards meeting of IEEE or AICC or ADL or ISO meetings in yet another city in yet another meeting room, we also had many of these meetings out at Phil and Sue's wonderful and historical Weems family farm house in Annapolis, Maryland.

I dug up this photo as it is so very fitting of Phil and these memories.  Not only does this show Phil (on the left), beaming as always, in front of a flip chart full of notes after one of these many meetings at the farm, but this is the photo that Phil chose to send me a few months ago when we were dealing with the loss of another great contributor, Claude Ostyn who is in the middle of this picture, along with Tyde Richards on the right.

Sue and Phil always encouraged us to stay over for the night, and though part of Phil's ulterior motive was to get more work done, it was also to have more time in the evenings to play music, enjoy a good Scotch, and discuss some of the wonderful history of the original Weems house and family. 

If the name Weems is not familiar to you, in the days before there was Global Positioning Systems or GPS, it was Phil's grandfather and namesake, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, the "Grand Old Man of Navigation" who modernized celestial navigation with the ingenious "Weems System of Navigation" and who invented such things as the Second Setting Watch.

I fondly recall Phil recounting some of the of the Weems family history and tales of his grandfather as we were taking a break from SCORM work and sitting in the study in the farmhouse which would more accurately be described as a wing of the Smithsonian navigation museum. Phil told of how Charles Lindbergh studied with Weems before attempting his 1928 transatlantic flight, and Admiral Byrd, a classmate of Weems at the Naval Academy, came to Weems for instruction before setting out for the North Pole.

Whether he knew it or not, Phil admirably carried on this family tradition by acting in so many ways as the "grand old navigator" himself for so many of us.  It was like a déjà vu experience for me to read in the following tribute to Captain Philip Weems:

Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, the "Grand Old Man of Navigation," is renowned as a pioneer in the field. He modernized navigation by simplifying techniques; invented and adapted new, time saving methods; and most significantly, shared this knowledge through the tireless teaching of his discoveries and insights. His pupils were naval officers and adventurers. His advancements, which began during his career as a naval officer, now stretch across all types of navigation - from maritime to aeronautic, from underwater to outer space.

Just as with his grandfather before him, Phil too was a pioneer, inventor, engineer, and teacher who worked tirelessly to convert his visions to explicit form and share them with all of us so passionately.  Phil has left us with a plethora of navigational instruments, tables and maps in the form of things like SCORM documents and tools, ADL-R and so much more to help chart our way forward in the often confusing seas of learning, education, and training.

On Saturday, we lost our "grand navigator" but Phil Dodds has left us well equipped to find our own way now.

Thanks for the memories and the navigational aids Phil!

w
a
yne
=====

Technorati tags: Phil Dodds, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, ADL, SCORM, memory, ADL-R, Weems, navigation

del.icio.us tags: Phil Dodds, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, ADL, SCORM, memory, ADL-R, Weems, navigation

Don't Mean to Bug You, but .......

Jonas Salk, the man who developed the polio vaccine, once said "If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared, within 50 years all species would flourish as never before." There would be some debate as to the precise figures and outcomes here but the point is well taken I think. No reason to despair either, but humble pie should probably be a regular part of our diet, and here's chance to gain some more IQ points from taking this new perspective.

The earth without people

If you're curious about a scenario of the earth without humanity, check out "Earth Without People, an essay by Alan Weisman in the February 6, 2007 issue of Discover magazine. Weisman describes some possible scenarios. His article includes the the chart shown here, which lays this out on a timeline. 

His essay concluded with the following:

"During that same span, every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients seaward, where most life would be, as it was long before vertebrates crawled onto the shore. Eventually, that would happen again. The world would start over."

And one bit of good news to some is that if all humans were to disappear, so too would some other species that have become dependent upon us, most notably the cockroach!  But for all of you cheered by this thought, remember that it requires that we leave first! 

Recommended Reading:

For more on this perspective, as well as a good read, I'm recommending you consider reading Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us. To help you decide if it's worth your time see Starting Over, the recent review (Sept.2, 2007) by Jennifer Schuessler who describes Weisman's book as

"wherein he imagines what would happen if the earth’s most invasive species—ourselves—were suddenly and completely wiped out."

"When it comes to mass extinctions, one expert tells him, “the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting. Weisman’s gripping fantasy will make most readers hope that at least some of us can stick around long enough to see how it all turns out."

Next up for your reading consideration and taking us back to insects, check out  Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects. For some "decision support" with this one, read the excerpt and review in Discover called "Bzzzzzzz: Why insects are vital to human survival."

Bee-ware

Let's do another one of those "inverted thinking" flips we covered in my posting "New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking Up!" Rather than consider our elimination, imagine what would happen if all the insects were to disappear?  According to Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson:

"If all insects were to suddenly vanish overnight, it’s likely humans would be endangered. All the plants that insects pollinate would disappear. All our detritus would pile up to colossal heights. Even the oceans would be affected. Nutrients would pour down off the increasingly denuded land into the sea, triggering massive algal blooms, which would exhaust the water of oxygen and threaten fish. And the impact on terrestrial ecosystems would be enormous."

“If insects were gone, you would break a large part of the terrestrial food chain. A number of birds would starve in no time at all. Those birds and other animals that depend on birds for food would disappear. Small mammals in the soil that depend, in part, on insects would disappear. It would be a catastrophic chain reaction around the world.”

Not to be confused with extinction which is the much more gradual decline, does it sound too far fetched that entire species could suddenly go missing? Well, as you may have read, this is exactly what has been happening in the past two years to the  honeybee. Millions of bees all over the world, representing in some areas over 70% of their population, have have been disappearing. They leave their hives, never to return nor to be found. In the USA, the wild honeybees have all but completely disappeared. This been labeled "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) and remains an unsolved mystery.

BTW, don't be distracted by the erroneous reports that linked the disappearing bees to cell phone radiation!  However the research into this very serious problem of CCD may also be leading us to even greater understanding. For example it has been noted that just as industrial agriculture has created problems with pollution, antibiotic resistance, mad cow disease, etc., colony collapse disorder may be a result of a number of poor practices, including the fact that they've bred a superbee and most of the bees hauled around the country for pollination purposes are genetically identical, making them more susceptible to a bacterial or viral attack. On the plus side, InfoShop News has a related article "Organic Beekeepers Not Affected By Colony Collapse Disorder", which goes on to say:

“The problem with commercial operations is in pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics that are fed to the bees to prevent disease,” she said. “Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs (genetically modified organics).”

Even if the biology side of a world without bees is of less interest to you, consider the economic and human perspectives. In just the USA alone, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has estimated that CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses. CCD has caught the attention of Fortune magazine with three articles in the past few months including this quote from "As bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks";

"We wouldn't starve if the mysterious disappearance of bees, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, decimated hives worldwide. For one thing, wheat, corn, and other grains don't depend on insect pollination. 

But in a honeybee-less world, almonds, blueberries, melons, cranberries, peaches, pumpkins, onions, squash, cucumbers, and scores of other fruits and vegetables would become as pricey as sumptuous old wine. Honeybees also pollinate alfalfa used to feed livestock, so meat and milk would get dearer as well. Ditto for farmed catfish, which are fed alfalfa too. 

And jars of honey, of course, would become golden heirlooms to pass along to the grandkids. (Used for millennia as a wound dressing, honey contains potent antimicrobial compounds that enable it to last for decades in sealed containers.)"

Bees for Pets?

Perhaps the insect world has its own version of outsourcing and offshoring?  As you may know, honeybee originated in Europe and are not native to North America. This bee has put undue pressure on the native bees, whose populations until recently were in decline. They're still sorting out why the native bees are making a comeback, but interestingly, native bees called Mason bees have been successfully used by some farmers for pollinating crops. As noted in this Wikipedia entry on Mason bees:

"Most mason bees live in holes and can be attracted by drilling short holes in a block of wood. They are excellent spring season pollinators and, since they have no honey to defend, will only sting if squeezed or stepped on. As such, they make excellent garden "pets", since they both pollinate the plants and are safe for children and pets."

Wait!  Don't Buzz Off Course Just Yet!

But enough of insects for now. You may be asking what this has all got to do with YOU? As usual, I'm leading you along a path and toward a target, however unexpected, convoluted, and latent. In the next few posts. I'll provide a few more varied examples which have common powerful and pervasive patterns lurking beneath which will help provide new perspectives and new models for all of us to use to solve today's complex problems with innovative solutions. If, as I hope, you've previously made some great discoveries here at Off Course - On Target, please follow me a bit further, and I promise to do my best to lead you to more great discoveries along the way, and make it all worth your precious time.

w
a
yne
=====

Technorati tags: insects, bees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, perspectives, books, patterns, research, Jonas Salk, Alan Weisman, Earth Without Us

del.icio.us tags: insects, bees, colony collapse disorder, CCD, perspectives, books, patterns, research, Jonas Salk, Alan Weisman, Earth Without Us

New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under

In "New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking up!", we looked at the value of new perspectives in general and one perspective in particular—looking up more often to learn from the stars, sky, and space. Using the new Sky feature of Google Earth as an example, we also looked at gaining yet another perspective—by flying—and how we could tie two perspectives together to do things such as looking up at the stars to help us navigate our way on land and sea. Now I'd like to continue with our exploration of the power of perspectives by looking down and under.

The Power of Inversion

One trick I've found extremely useful for helping me solve problems and finding new perspectives is to invert things. For example, I remember how amazed I was as a young boy when I discovered that a telescope becomes a microscope (or vice versa), when you simply look from the other end!  Ever since, I've tried "looking through the other end" or inverting my thinking as much as I can to learn more, gain new insights, and see things more clearly from a new perspective.

Applying this inversion technique to the Google Sky example, what I'm hoping for next from Google or other providers of similar technology is the ability to point that camera in yet another direction—down! How about a "Sea" feature that would let us point our attention and camera the other way, down to what makes up over 71% of the Earth's surface; the oceans. It seems to me that we could learn a lot and gain many new perspectives by looking at what some call "Inner Space", the world's oceans and waterways, with at least the same intensity and resources we devote to Outer Space. Here is a brief and sobering overview of how little we currently know about the watery world around us, and some equally exciting projects that are tackling this deficit and revealing just how much we can gain from looking at it.

Networking the Oceans?

Let's start by checking out the Sept. 4th, 2007 article in the New York Times called "Bringing the Ocean to the World, in High-Def", which covers the new Ocean Observatories Initiative as well as some other very exciting major projects aimed at filling in a lot of our missing knowledge about the oceans that surround us. These endeavors are important because the oceans contain the vast majority of the earth's living space.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative involves two very different approaches:

• Placing a range of sensors in the oceans to provide directly measured data.
  
• Connecting all these sensors through the Internet so that all of the information gathered is accessible to the public and the scientific communities.

The new Ocean Observatories Initiative is:

"a multifaceted effort to study the ocean—in the ocean—through a combination of Internet-linked cables, buoys atop submerged data collection devices, robots and high-definition cameras. The first equipment is expected to be in place by 2009."

From my perspective, we are in DESPERATE need of this proliferation of study and these approaches. I always thought it curious that we know so much more about "outer space", relatively speaking, than we do about the oceans around us or our "Planet Ocean" as it is sometimes referred. Think I'm being too hyperbolic (who me?!!)? Check out some of the following facts—some fun, but many that are are very serious and sobering.

Fascinating Ocean Facts

 

 

• Water is the only known substance that can exist as a gas, liquid or solid within the limited temperatures on Earth. 
• The oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and contain 97% of the Earth's water. 
• Less than 1% this is fresh water, and 2-3% is contained in glaciers and ice caps. 
• All life on earth is thought to have originated in the ocean. 
• An estimated 80% of all life on earth is found under the ocean surface. 
• Over 1 million known species of plants and animals live in the world's oceans, and scientists say there may be as many as 9 million species we haven't discovered yet ( = almost 90 % UN discovered!). 
• 96.5% of the total water on earth is in the global oceans. 
• Oceans contain 99% of the living space on the planet. 
• Less than 10% of that space has been explored by humans. 
• The average depth of the ocean is 3,795 m. The average height of the land is 840 m. 
• 90% of all volcanic activity occurs in the oceans. 
• The top ten feet of the ocean holds as much heat as the entire atmosphere. 
• One study of a deep-sea community revealed 898 species from more than 100 families and a dozen phyla in an area about half the size of a tennis court. More than half of these were new to science.

 

At best, it is estimated that we have only mapped about 10% of the ocean floor in any detail. So what?  Remember the US submarine San Francisco that crashed into an underwater mountain near Guam back in January 2005? While the details are still under investigation, the biggest factor is the simple fact that we didn't know the mountain was there!   

Don't know what we don't know!

As stunning as some of these facts are in revealing how little we know about "Inner Space", recent studies are strongly suggesting that our ignorance is MUCH larger!  And this isn't just because the oceans are so obviously vast. We don't seem to do much better with waters that are very close to us land lubbers. For example, consider the recent study (Jan.2006) of the Gulf of Maine done as part of the Census of Marine Life, with the Huntsman Marine Science Center of St. Andrews, New Brunswick, which found in their first count of known marine species in the Gulf of Maine region (3,317 and counting) was more than 50% larger than previous estimates!

But there's hope at hand. Going back to the New York Times article, it also points out many more and equally promising projects for the direct study and measurement "of the ocean - in the ocean." Each project is directly and very accurately measuring different sets of characteristics, such as temperature, currents, life forms, and also detailing their effects on land, current changes, role in climate change, etc. But what struck me the most was that all the individual projects are adopting a common approach of being open, interactive, and connected. As a result, these individual projects are similar to nodes on a network and benefiting from the same network effect where the whole is indeed so much greater than the sum of the parts. One of the studies, for example, involves a series of underwater cables that will crisscross the tectonic plate known as Juan de Fuca in the Pacific Northwest, which as Dr. John R. Delaney put it:

“For the first three or four years, people just laughed when I said we’re going to turn Juan de Fuca Plate into a national laboratory,” Professor Delaney said. “Now they’re not laughing.”

As an added bonus and as a Canadian, I was also tickled to learn that Canada is putting in its own cabled network for more of the Straits of Juan de Fuca off the coast of British Columbia, which is where I last lived in Canada and where the rest of my family lives.

In another post, I'll add some overview comments on the meta-trends and patterns that are emerging in both these recent marine examples as well as the likes of Google Sky, which we covered in New Perspectives: The Benefits of Looking Up.

Until then, as sailors say:

"May you have fair winds and following seas."

w
a
yne
=====

del.icio.us tags: perspectives, ocean, oceans, marine life, water, marine, ocean facts, fun facts, Ocean Observatories Initiative, networking, Juan de Fuca, submarine, inverted thinking, lateral thinking, thought sparks

Technorati tags: perspectives, ocean, oceans, marine life, water, marine, ocean facts, fun facts, Ocean Observatories Initiative, networking, Juan de Fuca, submarine, inverted thinking, lateral thinking, thought sparks