Off Course-On Target

Free Wins Against Malaria

Below, thanks to Kevin Kelly, is a good example of the effectiveness of the "free economy" and how it can be applied to the physical "real" world of bits, not just the digital world of bytes.  Even better, this highlights a great cause, Malaria No More and their Nothing But Nets campaign. 

If you are looking for a way of gifting a difference in the world, consider buying some nets ($10 each) and help make Malaria No More a reality in 2010.

** If you donate between now and Dec.31, 2009 your gift will be matched dollar for dollar, so consider donating NOW!

Free works in the world of bits and good causes

Free Wins Against Malaria

"Nothing free can be valuable" say some critics. That is, giving away things devalues them. This is obviously untrue in the digital realm, but what about physical things? The fear of the free was especially an issue in charity. If, with good intentions, you give medicines, or pumps, or solar panels, to the needed for free, won't they neglect, or trade off, or ignore these gifts?  In particular, if you give long-lasting insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets to families in malaria territory, would they just use them for fishing, or sell them? Maybe you should sell them the nets originally for a small amount?

Turns out after many years of testing, that the free nets are incredibly effective in reducing malaria. Free wins! The story by Jeffery Sachs is here in Scientific American. Or you can read the PDF for the academic paper on the experiment.

Free or not, nets are a great idea and better than malarial drugs. If you want to fund a net ($10), there's a number of places that help  you do that, including Nothing But Nets.

 

via kk.org

What It’s All About

Want to see what it is all about? Want to see a real live humanitarian and all around great person?

Check out this video of my dear friend Linda English, a founder and Director of Membership Development, Learning for International NGOs LINGOs, www.lingos.org

This is from the Microsoft Alumni Foundation, Honors 2009 Integral Fellows ceremony on Wednesday (Nov.18, 2009).

You GO girl!

Great Thoughts

Here's another posting derived from my ever growing list of items to blog about.  This one springs from an article I read in the IEEE Spectrum back in Jan 2007.   

Did I mention I’m behind in my postings and the list is growing? However on the plus side I like this delay because it acts as a check on just how relevant and useful things are.  If it stands the test of time, it gets posted, and this one passed the test with flying colors.

The title of this posting “Great Thoughts” is the same as the article by Robert W. Lucky (IEEE Fellow), now retired. In it, he wrote: 

“There is a theory of creativity that holds that creativity is most often the product of the unexpected intersection of two previously unconnected thoughts. If you are thinking very hard about one such thought, perhaps you are suppressing the other thoughts that could connect with it. On the other hand, if your mind is a perfect blank…”

This is an interesting conundrum: not focusing too much on one thing yet not shutting out all thought, something that my ADD riddled brain can't even comprehend!

But for me, the takeaway here has more to do with the question of what constitutes “new” these days?  What makes something original?  What constitutes plagiarism or copying?  What is at the heart of innovation and creativity in the world today?

In this era where more and more things are mashups, a new assembly of previously existing things, is there any such thing as an original idea, song, drawing, text, etc.?  The answer is more "yes" than "no", I think, but it is worth noting that most of the time what is new and what makes something unique is not the bits and pieces that it is made from, but the selection of certain items and the way they are assembled into a new whole. And most often, the value of this new assembly is much greater than the sum of the parts.

This concept is nothing new really. Think of some fundamental examples such as text, where we have almost all existing words available in the dictionary (although the list is growing and evolving all the time), yet from this finite set of letters and words we can create an infinite number of written documents (e.g. articles, books, poems, and scripts). Or music where we have another finite set of notes and chords that enable us to create an infinite number of new songs, melodies, and even ring tones!

This combining of existing things to create new things, the heart of the Snowflake Effect is what makes it a scalable model. Not that we won’t also be creating new bits and pieces along the way, such as the new words which are added to dictionaries every year, but for the most part I think most of what is new and valuable, most of the innovation and creativity we are and will be seeing, comes from the serendipitous intersection of two or more previously existing things, be they thoughts, ideas, notes of music, letters and words, lines, arcs or circles.

So here’s to celebrating and fostering the creativity in all of us by focusing on being the unique snowflakes we all are and designing more and more new original ideas and “stuff” from what we already have around us.

Finding More by Looking Less

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve noticed that I’ve been recalling a favorite metaphor many times in a great variety of conversations and communications with different people so I take this as a reminder to post a bit more about it. 

Many of you know my fondness for serendipity, which I describe simply as the unexpected discovery of something better while searching for something else. I’ll leave the topic of serendipity to another longer exploration and explanation, but for me serendipity is the way I live my life, both professionally and personally, and I believe it is the most powerful way to success.

Today I wanted to just mention one technique I have found to be very useful in the pursuit of more serendipitous discoveries and that is to purposefully NOT focus directly on whatever it is that you are looking for at the time. I think I first hit upon this  technique when I learned about an interesting fact about the way our eyes work and, specifically, why we have a “blind spot” in our vision.  As I understand it, because of the way the optic nerve attaches to the back of the eye, we have a blind spot where it attaches. The best example of how this comes into play is what happens when you are looking at the stars. The next time you get a chance to look up on a starry night, try to find either a faint star, galaxy, or a cluster of stars.  What you will find is that you can only really see these when you do NOT look directly at them but instead focus your attention off to one side.

I thought this effect was quite fascinating and as usual, I’ve turned this into a general concept which seems to hold true in other instances, not just with sight. Ever notice that when you get stuck trying to remember something or are solving a tough problem, the harder you try to focus on it or solve it, the less you succeed?  And then when your mind has wandered off onto something else or you do something completely different, the answer or solution comes to you in a flash?

On an even more general scale and conceptual level, I have observed that this same phenomenon is true. For example, as I’ve studied people and organizations who are exceptionally successful, I’ve noticed that they are usually the ones who focus the least directly on what other might see as their main goal. In business, for example, the most successful and profitable businesses seem to focus the least on profitability itself and more on such things as figuring out a fundamental value proposition for their customers and finding as many innovative ways as possible to deliver on it. 

Or in other cases, an organization starts out assuming it is going after one thing and discovers that the real value is in something else. Netflix, the “DVD in the mail” subscription company comes to mind as a good example. You’d think that their focus would be on the movies, having the most available, getting the ones you want to you the fastest, etc.  And these are indeed important elements of their success. However, their greatest value is helping people find “just the right movie” to watch. This capability comes in the form of their recommender system known as Cinemax. This technology takes the input you provide on which movies you like and don’t like and uses this information to create recommendations that become almost frighteningly accurate. If you’re interested in more on this, I wrote up a longer explanation recently on the Long Slow Chat called “$1 Million Dollar Snowflake Prize”, which details a fascinating competition Netflix is running for the first person who can increase the effectiveness of the Cinemax system by 10%. 

Most recently, my friend Marcia Conner sent me a note to her amusement on serendipitously discovering some recent research by Paul Whitmore Sas that seems to essentially support this same model of indirection. Paul titled his work descriptively as “How to spot your life’s guiding star” and you can download the full dissertation if you want more.  He talks about the Delmore Effect (named after the apparently failed poet Delmore Schwartz), which is the situation where:

“most people tend to set much more explicit goals for low priority domains than for their most important ambitions.”

To prevent this from happening, Paul’s research was based on the same star gazing example that I cited earlier and which Paul referenced as follows:

"Astronomers know to look slightly away from the point at which they expect to locate a star. Analogously, when a person aims to most clearly articulate her own guiding goals, she would be more successful by calling to mind the values which are peripherally related and supportive of her complete self.

Instead of directly confronting the value of greatest import, a person can become more articulate about their central life goals by taking a slightly less direct approach."

Interesting reading.  I recommend you give this method of indirection at try and see if you don’t find more by looking less.

Where Is Value in the Economy of “Free”

Seems like one of my recent postings “Good Luck Trying to Copy a Snowflake”  on the Long Slow Chat, resonated with many of you. The Long Slow Chat is a blog that Erik Duval and I are using to focus more on the Snowflake Effect. I got a lot of comments in particular about my note that:

“I think we are now in an era where there is an inverse correlation of ease of copying with value.“

I remember being struck by this idea when Kevin Kelly first published his article “New Rules for the New Economy” in Wired magazine back in September 1997.  He talked about the “The Law of Plentitude: More gives More".  When you couple this with the fact that value is directly related to scarcity, the uniqueness generated by the Snowflake Effect takes on a a very large and new value. 

For example, I have often observed that content has little-to-no value in and of itself. In large part, this is because content has become so plentiful and abundant. In this context, I’m using the term content to describe anything recorded or captured, such as illustrations, drawings, text, video, audio, and music. Largely due to the Internet, content has become increasingly easy to copy and distribute, and therefore its value, based on scarcity, has been on the asymptote towards zero and getting closer by the minute. 

But if there is an inverse relationship between value and the ease of copying, such that most content has no value, then where do we find value and in what?  Well, I believe there is still a direct correlation between value and scarcity. So in the case of content, the value comes from the mantra of the Snowflake Effect; that is, getting it “just right”—just the right content to the right person at the right time and in the right way.  Reflect upon this a moment and see what you think. Would you not find that your valuation of any piece of content is directly related to how useful it is to you at a specific time and in a specific context? 

To my way of thinking then, the value proposition for content is transforming it from a “product” to a “service”, since the value comes not from the content itself but from when it is the right content for the right person at the right time. All this is very much in keeping with my noun/verb perspectives but I’ll leave that for a future posting.

I was therefore delighted to find that Kevin too has also been working more on this theme of copying and value, and he has recently published his thoughts in an intriguing article called “Better Than Free” on his blog The Technium, which is also the new book he is working on. But this same article has also just been published on the Change This site in PDF format.

I highly recommend that you check out this article from either source to get some new perspectives on where value comes from in this economy where “free” is increasingly predominant. Kevin addresses the challenge that most others seem to ignore or deny, which is "where will value come from and how will there be a fully functioning 'free economy'?"  As Kevin succinctly said:

“How do you make money with the free?”

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

As you will read in his article, Kevin goes on to describe eight things which are “better than free” and are values that can't be copied, which he calls “generatives”:

“A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time.”

The eight generatives are:

1. Immediacy
2. Personalization
3. Interpretation
4. Authenticity
5. Embodiment
6. Patronage
7. Findability

As you can imagine, I was particularly interested to see "personalization" on this list. From my (no doubt biased) perspective, the whole list is part of the Snowflake Effect, where getting to a state of “just right” is key. And more so than characteristics, this list of generatives creates a list of qualities and competencies that will be increasingly important and valuable for all of us. More on that in some future postings.

I particularly liked a note Kevin makes at the end of the article:

“In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.”

Attention is about as personal a quality as I can imagine, and is one which I value especially since I suffer so acutely from a deficit of it.

I’ll have more on this whole theme of copying, originality, sources of value, new competencies, and attention in future postings. For now, I’d recommend that you give some of your very valuable attention to this topic and this article, and I look forward to hearing more about what you think about the sources of value in an economy of "free."

Predicting the Future Starts Now!

In my previous posting “Inventing the Future” I covered the upcoming competition created by a combination of Jane McGonigal and the ten year forecast team at the Institute for the Future called “Superstruct”. They describe it as “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game.”

"By playing the game, you'll help us chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face,"

"Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It's about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential."

As with all Jane’s alternate reality games, this one starts with a scenario. In the case of Superstruct, it begins with the following:

"Humans have 23 years to go:  Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens. PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens—the human race—from "indefinite" to 23 years."

When the game is over, the Ten Year Forecast team at the IftF will will review and analyze all the input received and post a report of the key insights for the year 2019, and the best tactics for inventing and "superstructing” the future.

Well the game is now live (as of Oct. 6, 2008) and will run for about the next six weeks.  There are a number of fun and informative videos on the Superstruct site such as the one above.  So for those of you who are interested in joining in the fun head on over to the Superstruct site and start predicting the future now!

Happiness is the Snowflake Effect on Spaghetti Sauce

As Erik Duval, my fellow "snowflake" knows all too well from my incessant ramblings over the years, I’m of the sincere belief that the purpose of life is happiness.  By this I mean happiness or joy of the very deep, profound kind: experiencing great joy in your own life and living your life to help others to experience great joy in their's.  So while recently watching TED Talks, I was intrigued by a talk from 2004 called  “What can we learn from spaghetti sauce” by  Malcolm Gladwell on finding happiness with spaghetti sauce.  Malcolm’s talk is about his long standing fascination and respect for the work of Howard Moskowitz, a world renowned expert in “psychophysics” and author of Selling Blue Elephants. 

I found the whole thing to be a fabulous example of the Snowflake Effect.  Here's an excellent use of 17 minutes and 42 seconds of your valuable time.

In Malcolm’s description of what he gets from Howard’s work, he noted for example how Howard has been instrumental in changing people’s thinking in the food and beverage industry. Prior to Howard’s interventions and insistence with the food and beverage industry, “everyone was looking for universals”, “looking for one way to treat all of us”, “something to please all of us”, “finding the rules that govern all of us”, and being surprised or puzzled when they failed to be successful in doing so.

These are very similar to the questions Erik and I are raising in our focus on the Snowflake Effect. Why it is that we seem to live in a world designed for sameness when we live in a world inhabited by unique "snowflakes"?  In Malcolm’s estimation, the biggest change in science in recent years has been “the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability”.  Obviously you’ll need to listen to Malcolm’s TED talk to understand the context, (one of my ulterior motives here), and I ‘d also highly recommend listening to Howard himself, such as in this interview of Howard by Phil Windley on Technometria.

To me, Malcolm was articulating a great example of the Snowflake Effect on spaghetti sauce, science, and coffee.  The reason I think Malcolm is so passionate about happiness and Howard’s work (he has been writing and talking about his hero consistently for many years) is summed up in his closing line in this TED talk where he explains that he thinks the most beautiful lesson of Howard Moskowitz is “that by embracing the diversity of human beings we will find a surer way to true happiness.”  Couldn’t have said it better myself, Malcolm!  This is why Erik and I are so passionately pursuing a better understanding and awareness of the Snowflake Effect.

Coming to Our Senses: Touch

As I sit here typing on my keyboard and clicking my mouse, I find myself desperately hoping we may finally be moving beyond our narrow view of what form interfaces between humans and technology can take to one where we can be more creative and innovative...and effective!

Seems to me that today, almost every interface is limited to no more than a variation on more button pushing!  Computers, for example, come with keyboards and mice, and we even carry this metaphor of button-pushing onto the screen with “virtual buttons” that we have to "push".  And  even smaller devices, such as mobile phones, are designed with button-driven interfaces.

Recently we’ve transferred button-pushing over to “touch” screens on phones and we think that this is just "oh so cool' and innovative.  Give me a break!  Most examples don’t even work as well as a real button!  Ever tried to type more than a word or two on a touch screen keyboard?

Enough with the buttons already!!

There is a glimmer of hope, however, in the world of interfaces!  Some of the new phones from Samsung (currently only available in China) use Immersion’s VibeTonz technology, a tactile feedback that simulates the feeling of pushing a mechanical button even though the surface is completely flat and does not move. It is the latest example of a new breed of haptic technologies that do for the sense of touch what high definition displays and surround sound do for eyes and ears. (see links at end for more on haptic technologies)

But I believe that the lack of feedback in touch screen devices will severely limit their success and adoption, and that someday we will shake our heads when we remember how we lived “out of touch” for so long without the use of touch in interfaces.

Hope on the Horizon?

But surely we can be more creative and innovative with our interactions and interfaces than limiting every solution to simply a variation on more button pushing!  Currently we are seeing innovative uses of touch screens that provide a better interface and interaction with our digital world. Applications on the iPhone and other smartphones, for example, let you flick or flip things around, such as a set of digital photos or stacks of music CD artwork. This use of “gestures” as a way of interacting has great promise and recent examples, such as the Wii controller and some of the multi-person, multi-touch interfaces on digital surfaces are showing great promise. 

Since touch works in both directions—as feedback to us and feedback from us—I'm delighted to see the use of haptic interfaces with the Wii controller, which generates physical feedback to your hands as you strike a tennis ball or golf ball, for example, and simultaneously uses your physical input to provide velocity and angle as you swing a golf club and the resultant force applied to the ball. Airplane and car simulation game controllers (joy sticks, steering wheel, brake & gas pedals) also provide similar haptic feedback. Flight simulators for training pilots and amusement park “virtual reality rides” show us how truly real, natural, and effective touch interfaces can be.

Let’s Stop Flapping and Start Flying!

But these incremental improvements, like touch screen buttons and limited haptic feedback, also serve to continue our "flapping" behavior of mimicking physical button pushing.  Our tendency to focus on copying what worked well in the past, such as designing planes that mimic flapping wings on birds or pushing buttons for machines, is in fact holding us back from truly "flying"!  If you are not familiar with my use of this metaphor of "flapping vs. flying", take a few minutes to read or listen to my story on “Confusing Flapping with Flying”. 

To start truly "flying", that is developing truly innovative solutions, I think we need to focus on the use of touch and tactile feedback as some of the essential elements of successful interactions and interfaces.  For example, the ability for us to feel and touch any object even though it is not “really there” and similarly for our technology to acquire the sense of feel and touch.

Less Virtual, More Real

Early applications of virtual reality used to seem pretty cool but now they seem, as my daughter liked to say to me, “Oh so yesterday, Dad!”.  These early efforts failed because they were too virtual and too far from reality. Today, we can see clearly how much of a difference it makes when, for example, motion, sound ,and color is added to movies. More recently ,the addition of some 3D, high definition, and high fidelity has narrowed this "reality gap" to our eyes and ears. And virtual reality applications required all that extraneous equipment, such as headsets, goggles, helmets, gloves and even full body suits, to provide the feedback to or from us, which severely separate or distanced us from the reality of the situation.

So, what if we moved towards being more real and more natural?  What if we had digital models with haptic interfaces that let us feel, handle, turn, assemble and disassemble them? How about applying full haptic feedback to a holographic images? Imagine if holographs provided not just stunning visual 3D reality, but also came with haptic feedback to your hands, so that you could feel their edges, curves, and shapes?

Digital Clay:  Digital Prototyping gets Real

Moving along the reality scale, we already have very functional and bidirectional digital prototyping via 3D scanners and 3D printers.  Together these can both create digital models from existing objects (input) as well create new fully-functional physical objects (output). Such digital prototyping can all be done BEFORE we start using large amounts of materials and energy to produce the “real things” ** and before we use the energy and resources to create these physical entities. This capability may well turn out to be one of the single greatest ways of conserving resources and energy and bringing some much needed practical reality to the “green” movement.

Leaping (and lurching) further forward, wouldn’t it be great have true virtual digital prototyping that gave us an experience equal to that of having the real thing in our hands?  How about if we could move beyond digital clay to “real clay” where haptic sensors and generators were built-in at the nano level or could be more like the holographic + haptic models I mentioned previously.  With this digital clay in your hands, you could now create any shapes and objects you like "by hand" or you could add some "clay" to your 3D printed models or you could use 3D printing to create a whole model out of digital clay and use this as the starting point of your design work or testing.

AND, now how about if we also hook up some of that digital clay “backwards”, so that rather than limiting the feedback to one direction—from our hands to the clay— it could also move from the clay to our hands?!

Say what, Wayne?

Well, imagine you are on a team whose members reside in many different locations. Your team is designing some physical object, such as a new smart phone. Rather than “just” having a 3D printer create the latest design iteration of the phone on your desk as a “solid”, what if every team member had one made out of digital clay and whenever you changed the phone's shape or moved some buttons, for example, the other phones at the other locations changed accordingly. You each would have a working version.

THAT sounds a lot more real and a lot less virtual to me, and it's all possible by adding the use of our sense of touch to our interactions with technology.

** BTW, this example starts to show how increasingly strained the concept of “real” is becoming and what I see as another trend towards the closing and ultimate elimination of the “reality gap”.  But I’ll expand more upon this in a future posting.

eSkin

The integration of sensory feedback and control within technology provides another look at touch working in reverse (so to speak), and it is equally important and fascinating.  One recent example is the progress being made with “e-Skin” for robots. This new material  is the first that combines two key characteristics:

• The ability to stretch like rubber
• The ability to conduct electricity like metal into a single substance

They’ve accomplished this with carbon nanotubes and used it to allow robots or machines to “feel” heat, pressure, and texture. I was equally intrigued with e-skin's potential to to stretch into larger sizes and onto curved non-flat shapes. I can imagine how this could lead to having displays in your pocket that you can pull out, unroll, and stretch into a large scale screen for viewing, or applications as "skin" grafts for burn victims.

Hiding Everything but the Benefits

Some have suggested that Jules Verne completely missed the computer and all its technology in his futuristic books such as 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. But I think Verne got it completely right by NOT focusing on or imagining computers and technology. He simply assumed that the compute power was just “there” behind the scenes. I loved the way he kept the focus on the fantastic capabilities and the grand adventures we would have if such capabilities existed.  Who cares how or what enables them?

So it is my belief and my hope that we are finally seeing technology dissolve into the background and into ourselves so that the focus can be on people, challenges, solutions, and great adventures in life. I know I'm signed up for the pursuit of joy and as such I welcome and champion any and all movement towards more natural interfaces and the use of all of our human senses to communicate and work more effectively with each other and with our supporting cast of machines and technology.

BTW, here are links to some good animation on haptic interfaces/technology from Grabriel Robes-De-la-Torre and a full paper on “Haptic interfaces and Devices”.

Coming to our Senses

If you have been kind enough to listen to me or read some of my entries on OCOT or my other writings, you may have correctly concluded that I suffer from a severe case of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Contrary to popular opinion (and even some “experts”), ADD is not about a LACK of “attention” but rather, an excess of it! 

And Now a Word from My Symptom

Those of us with ADD are unable to pay attention to just ONE thing at a time and are instead forced to pay attention to every sensory input all of the time. We try to make sense of things when EVERY thing is demanding our focus. All of our sensory inputs are dealt with equally and simultaneously. 

What we can’t do, for example, is turn down the volume on every sound except the one we want to focus on. We can't tune out the movements we see around us or choose not feel every input through our skin. In other words, we can only pay attention to EVERYTHING, all at the same time and all at equal levels.

I’m one of the fortunate few with ADD who, long before I knew what it even was, began to develop  coping skills and techniques to survive with these traits. They didn’t seem like anything special to me.  For the longest time, I just assumed everyone else was having the same experience.  And somehow I managed to start turning these “bugs” into features that have enabled me to be as successful as I am and to do what I do. If everything demands your attention and you find everything interesting, then life is very full!

If you are interested in learning more about ADD, look at some of these  alternative descriptions.  And on the topic of attention itself, I know of no better source than that of my dear friend and fellow ADDer Marcia Conner and her Ageless Learner site’s section on Attention and on How Adults Learn.

But now, back to the topic at hand (see what I mean?!)

It All ADDs Up

So why are my ADD tendencies relevant here?  Because its a way to introduce a meta theme that I'd like to address on OCOT. Just as my own natural sensory interface presents challenges, so too are the challenges of developing human/machine sense-based interfaces. Over a series of postings, I'd like to address:

• The use of our human senses as ways through which we communicate and interact with machines, computers, and technology, and ourselves. 
• Other interrelated topics both individually and as a collective whole. 

I’ll do my best to stay "on target" as I wander around "off course" and divide my pursuit of this trend toward more natural and sense-based interfaces into several separate posts. I see it playing a critical role in the future I am both designing and imagining.  

The Missing Link?

Interestingly, this whole topic of natural or sense-based interfaces does not seem to have any common singular term or definition. Or perhaps I just have not found it and some of you can point me to it?  I’m aware of categories such as:

• HCI  Human Computer Interaction/interface
• HMI Human Machine Interface/interaction
• User Interface

But these all seem to be differentiated based on interactions with specific types of technology, computers only, or segmented into individual human senses, such as touch with the use of haptic interfaces and technology with tactile feedback . And I can find definitions of HCI, HMI such as this one from Wikipedia that describe them as:

“...the 'layer' that separates a human that is operating a machine from the machine itself.”

However, my interest is in the larger meta theme of using all human senses and eliminating the “separation layer” between machines and ourselves so that they are invisible and we can directly connect and communicate through our senses. I’m want to ensure that we are taking the more holistic and inclusive view of the use of ALL of our senses, not only because we have so many that are being underused, but also because it is often the combination of multiple senses that make up our best experiences and interactions.

Making Sense of and Better Use of Our Senses

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll address the meta theme of sense-based and more natural interfaces through a variety of posts, podcasts, and perhaps some interviews over the next few months. I’ll alternate between the big picture view of the use of senses in general and the use of them collectively, then look at the use of individual senses such as touch and feel, audio, visual, and so on. I will also cover the use of combinations of senses for better, more innovative designs and solutions for interacting with technology...and each other. Add to this the coverage of tools, technology, and examples of real world applications of sensory-based and natural interfaces and I think we’ll have a lot of fun and learn a lot in the process. These posts will be intermixed with other topics on a regular basis and spread over many months for as long as my and your interest continues to be high.

Oh!  Look at that cool blue butterfly that just flew by!  Hmm, I wonder what kind of plane that is flying overhead?  Now what was I saying?  Oh yeah, senses, interfaces, human interaction... 

Hang on, fasten your seatbelts low and tight, we’re about to take off on what should prove to be a fun and very "off course", very "on target" sensory journey!

Experts...like you and me?

In previous postings, I’ve pointed out that we're living in a world of exponential change and that this is affecting all of us in many different ways. You can find my thoughts and references on this with a quick search on exponential change on OCOT as well as my overall article and podcast. 

To continue with this theme, today I'd like to explore how this world of exponential change has affected our concept of expertise and experts. Has it changed as well? What do you do when you need some assistance and there are no experts to be found based on our traditional definitions? 

The rapid introduction of technologies such as entire new programing languages, new software and hardware; or on the social side, things like social networking, un-conference event models, and so on, challenge our understanding of expertise,  and our traditional models and techniques for obtaining expertise and for finding those who have it.

While it is often true that there are very few completely new ideas and so many very new things are based on very old ideas, previous work, models and products, it still seems as if we are seeing more that are truly new and different. Being so new, we have no Ph.D programs,  certification programs, or other credentials in place, and in many cases, not very much experience or expertise at all because these technologies  and models are new to everyone. It helps in part that large scale adoption of anything new typically takes 10 or more years (see this “Long Nose” post by Erik Duval for more on this) but it often takes even longer for us to establish the traditional forms of denoting expertise and creating the experts themselves. What do we do in the meantime and even more so what do we do as the rate of change trends ever upwards?  Will our traditional models continue to work at all? For example:

• What does this mean for “boards” or other committees of experts for an organization, company, association?  If these are becoming less effective what is the better choice?
• In the absence of any “formal” credentials, how to you find and deploy individual experts and consultants? 
• Is there a value to a “panel of experts” at a conference?  If so, who should be on the panel?
• How does our understanding of new more contrarian models such as “wisdom of the crowds” and the “Blink” approach affect our definition and use of experts?

You get the idea, and I’m sure you can come up with your own list as well. 

Finding Solutions

I quite like and often quote Einstein’s observation that:

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

More often though, I think our problem is that we are restricted by our thinking which as been shaped by the previous paradigm and so we search for solutions to the new paradigm from within the old. As we seek to find and develop solutions to this new challenge of identifying and finding expertise and experts, we can take advantage of the way other things are growing exponentially.  For example:

• The degree to which these technologies can help us find and connect with others who are focused on the new “thing” we are interested in.  There are usually many more experts and more expertise out there than we assume or were previously able to find.
• The increased exposure more and more of us are having to new products, programs and ideas and therefore pursuing our curiosity with them thus taking the first steps towards developing more expertise.
• The increased access and availability for learning about and experimenting with these new ideas, products and services.  This is especially true in the form of the more informal learning we are increasingly doing through our daily forms of (re)search, reading, listening and otherwise consuming the exponential growth of “content” available to us.

Experts "R" Us!

So how do we find the right experts and expertise at the right time?  First, we need to get better at finding expertise that often goes unnoticed or remains unknown to us.  If you don’t know it’s there, then it essentially doesn’t exist!  In my experience, we often fail to find experts because it doesn’t appear in most people’s job description or title.  Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone AFTER a project was over (typically in an informal setting) and realizing that they have this incredible expertise and experience? Have you caught yourself saying something like “Where were you when I needed you?”  And worst of all, did you find that they were right under your proverbial nose, right next door or even already working for or with you?

I’ve long advocated that we need to work to dramatically scale up the amount of metadata we have for each of us. By this I mean the enormous list of individual attributes that define and describe us as unique individuals—deeply detailed metadata inventories of our skills, competencies, experiences, aptitudes, attitudes, knowledge and so on—and have it all being dynamically updated on a constant basis as we acquire new skills, have new experiences as well as those we lose from lack of use.  Just imagine how valuable it would be to find just the right person at just the right time when you need to add someone to a project team or have a question you need answered or an idea to test out.

Exponential Growth of Experts?

And perhaps most of all, we need to consider the potential of developing more expertise within each and every one of our exponentially expanding world population (currently 6.7 Billion and counting!).  We need to learn to see and find the expertise in all of us, both collectively and individually. By collective, I am thinking of the growing awareness and understanding of the latent expertise that lies within a large group of people. This idea is nicely captured in James Surowiecki’s book “Wisdom of the Crowds”.  This is increasingly happening as we become more and more connected to more and more people and things. 

Individually I am thinking that if something is very new, then an “expert” could be defined as whomever has the most experience—often the individuals who have been early adopters, high risk takers, and those who jumped in from the beginning and have the most experiential learning as a result.  If you believe, as do I, that every one of us has some degree of expertise and our numbers and our amount of expertise is growing at an ever faster rate, then therein lies much of the solution to the problem of finding experts for the exponential growth of new ideas, products, and services. It all sounds very “loopy” (consider the source!), but it seems to me that we can indeed invert Einstein's observation and best find solutions for a new paradigm from within the NEW paradigm.

We probably need to get much better at learning in real time as we jump in and try out these new products, services and ideas.  We need to get better at doing a lot of post-mortems to analyze what worked, what didn’t would be smart.  Getting over our apparent reluctance to admit to or review failures, and instead learn from what doesn’t work well. If increasingly more things are very new and we have less and less experience with them, should we not expect to be in an almost constant state of exploration and discovery and expect “failure” to be more common than success? 

I don’t mean "failure"in a negative sense, nor do I mean that failure should become the goal. Rather, learning from what doesn’t work seems in my experience to be at least as valuable or more so than that which does. We’ve long known about the value of “practice” but usually separate and distinguish this from “the real thing” and regard practice as what we do to get ready for the real performance.  Perhaps we now live in a world where ALL we do is practice and strive for continuous improvement.

But I also believe in the old adage that “the more things change the more they stay the same”, and so we will continue to have the more traditional types of experts who are deeply specialized.  They will remain highly valuable and sought after.  However, given the enormity of the number of problems we have to solve, both large societal ones and small daily ones, and the fact that these are growing exponentially, we need, as they say,
"all the help we can get."  And I for one simply can’t imagine how we can be effective in solving problems through linear approaches, such as continuing to depend upon our traditional model and definition of expertise. 

As we start to live and work in this world of exponential change, we need to think exponentially as well. We need develop solutions and models which scale exponentially. Rethinking our definition of expertise and experts to be on more of a sliding scale and where we assume that each and every one of us have valuable expertise to offer seems to me the best direction to head as we search for more experts like you and me!