Off Course-On Target

Snowflake Effect on Financial Industry set to Double in 2012

Many of you were intrigued by some of my former postings such as Snowflakes Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes  about how the Snowflake Effect of mass personalisation is affecting the financial world and in particular with loans and investments.  Some wondered if this was just a few random examples but I think this recent overview on TechCrunch shows that this is already building into a full fledged snowstorm with what they refer to as “crowdfunding” having reached 1.5 Billion dollars already and set to double this year.

The funding of projects by individual snowflakes is another example of both the Snowflake Effect on financial matters such as the example of the “Pebble” watch I wrote about in Snowflake Wrists?.  When I wrote about this Pebble watch that is one of the projects on Kickstarter two weeks ago they had already blown past their $100k goal by raising $2.6 million, as of today (May 8) they are about to pass the 10 million dollar mark!  Kickstarter is “a funding platform for creative projects” and their blog recently had this “Blockbuster Effects” article which highlighted two other projects and answered the questions “Do more projects mean competition for the same dollars?” and “Are these projects stealing backers from other worthy projects?” by showing that in fact these have the opposite effect as both the overall funding and project numbers continue to grow dramatically.  The full and abridged versions of the “Crowdfunding Industry Report” are available at the bottom of the TechCrunch article.

These are but a few examples that confirm what Erik Duval and I have been evangelizing for many years now, that The Snowflake Effect is a profoundly pervasive revolution which is affecting almost all parts of our lives on a global scale.  There are over 7 billion of us snowflakes on the planet and as each one of us takes on the responsibility and control of our lives, love and learning, the results are going to be staggering.

Snowflake Wrists?

I wonder; will “wrist watch” become as quaint and oddly unrepresentative of the device as “phone” has become?

In a previous post I wrote about Kickstarter as an example how “Snowflake Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes”and more recently about how the Snowflake Effect is being used to augment our human capabilities such as with “Snowflake Eyes?”.  And today both of these effects get combined into the creation of wrist watches which can be infinitely personalized to display almost any data you want, receive notifications and control other digital devices. 

In particular I’m referring to an about to be funded Kickstarter project for what is being called a “Pebble Watch”.  Check out the short overview and photos on this Kickstarter page.

I’ve already sent in my $115 pledge and support and can’t wait until the first production run ships to me in September.  Well my dear friend John will actually get to try it out first as it will be shipped to his address as I ‘m not sure just where in the world I’ll be in September,  

** see http://learnativity.typepad.com if you’re interested in my whereabouts and sailing around the world. 

But John and I will find a way to link up and he will get to have fun with it first.  He is also the best technical reviewers I know so I’ll get the next best thing to using it myself and share more with you then.

Of course I am particularly susceptible to this one as I will admit to having a life long love of clocks and watches so as soon as I learned about this cool new “Pebble” watch was being proposed via the Kickstarter project, it was a no brainer for me to jump in.  But then again and as a testament to what I wrote up previously about how powerful this form of funding can be, this Pebble project had a goal of $100,000 that needed to be reached before these watches could start being made and they reached over $1 million in the first 28 hours, and as of this writing (April 14) they were over $2.6 million so the project is more than fully funded and will close on May 18th, 2012.

While I hear some say that watches are “so yesterday” and are declining in use as we have so many other sources for knowing the time on everything from our phones, to cameras, tablets, TV’s and computers, but I don’t see this happening so much and instead I think wrist watches will follow a path similar to phones.  Think about what you do with your “phone” on a daily basis and I think you too will find that you use it for almost everything but a “telephone” as you text, Email, read, take pictures, draw, get turn by turn directions, ask a question (type or voice), check the time and oh yea, make or answer a voice call.  In a similar way I think we will find ourselves continuing to chose to wear wrist watches for a long time to come and that we will start using them for so many more things than just telling time.

One of the reasons I think mobile devices and our “mobile” phones have become so ubiquitous for so many of us is that we are so much more likely to have them with us at the time and point of need, providing us with another big step towards the long promised “information at our fingertips”.   The more recent and significant jump to “smart” phones that connect to the web, have touch based interfaces and run applications was synchronistic with the move to more pro active and interactive uses of our devices such as the addition of a digital camera built into that ever present phone enabling us to capture that unexpected serendipitous moment. 

To my way of thinking, something you wear all the time increases the notion of “mobile” up by another order of magnitude and the net effect over time will be enormously popular and pervasive.  Consider how much more accessible a watch on your wrist is than a phone in our pocket or purse!  Many of us wear watches 24 hours a day so they are difficult to forget and truly always with you and there is no need to fumble as you fish it out of your pocket or purse.  It is always right there, right when you want it. VERY compelling to me at least.

Wearing a watch also seems to be such an easy way for so many people to try out truly useful “wearable computing”. While I personally am also looking forward to the days of having actual implants and bionic things like true inner ear “head phones” (another intriguingly quaint term), microphones and sight augmenting devices in and around our eyes, those less inclined to take this big step could easily strap on one of these type of new “smart watches”, no surgery or injections required!

Even in their initial release, these new Pebble watches can display most anything that is on your iPhone or Android device via Bluetooth, interact with and control these devices and notify you with sounds or vibrating alerts.  Additional HCI (Human Computer Interaction) comes in the form of the built in 3 axis accelerometer so you can use physical gestures such as shaking the watch to dismiss a notification or vibrating to let you know of an incoming call or notice or timer.  You can also receive notifications from your “if this then that” (www.ifttt.com) app and any routines and alerts you have set up there which is a very powerful and multiplying combination.  If you are not yet aware of IFTTT that alone is ell worth checking out ASAP.

What I’m’ excited about and how I will look forward to snowflaking my Pebble when I catch up with it include:

• having immediate access to my GPS and other boat info as I’m sailing.  I’ve already got things in place so that there is a full WiFi “bubble” on Learnativity and there are more and more apps and links between all my boat instrumentation, and navigation data with my laptops, boat computer, tablets and phones.  With the addition of one of these watches on my wrist will mean that all this data is always just a glance away and even some controls are ever present on my wrist no matter where I am on the boat, and even off much of the time.

 

• Getting vibrating alerts to wake me up if needed when I’m on a multi day passage and something happens that deserves my attention like a change in the wind or something popping up within the Radar alert circle I’ve programmed, or a call comes into my sat phone, or …… well you get the idea.

 

• Being able to customize any and all screens on the watch for things as simple as analog or digital watch faces to how much data to display.

 

• Instant access to my ever present music so I can mute it when a VHF radio call from another boat comes in or I want to skip a song that has come up that isn’t just right for the moment.

 

• abilty to receive alerts and notifications for any of the IFTTT (if this then that) routines I have set up. (see www.ifttt.com ) for details.

 

• and because I really do think these watches are going to take off and there is already an SDK kit for developers I’m looking forward to a future of more and more apps being written to extend all these capabilities.

None of these are new capabilities and I do have them on various devices, but that is kind of the point and the big deal with watches; I can now have access to all those other devices with me at all times, just a glance and an arms length away.  IMHO these are the very same reasons that mobile devices of all kinds have taken off so unexpectedly and exponentially in so many regions and cultures.

And don’t even get me started on the applications and implications these new watches will have on learning. There is fun story about teachers reminding their students “I know you are texting in class; not even teenagers look down at their crotch and smile for so long!” so I guess teachers will have a bit more trouble (though not too much) telling when student are texting in class. Or getting some “help” during an exam! However the positive uses FAR outnumber these more comical or negative ones and I’m sure I at least have yet to imagine some of the specific innovative new ways to use the wrist watch to augment our learning. In most cases though I see that the change will be less so in adding new capabilities we don’t have now and more the case of augmenting what we already have and applications that will be developed in the future and simply yet profoundly changing things dramatically by providing communications between us in the way of the Snowflake Effect; just the right person at just the right time in just the right way.

Time will tell (sorry couldn’t help myself) so stay tuned and do check out Kickstarter in general and this new Pebble watch in particular.  Maybe it is just the geek in me or maybe it is my watch fetish kicking in, but I fully expect the word “watch” to join the growing list of quaint understated terms like phone, computer and camera.  Hard for me to imagine that we won’t soon have young children asking “Where did the word phone come from?” and we will have some difficulty remembering the days of the telephone.

Seeing Around the Corner of the Future of Photography

I continue to believe that we are hitting the tipping point of the exponential curve of the evolution of what we currently call photography.  I think photography and camera are becoming as ill fitting as terms like calling and phone.  Don't you find it interesting that one of the things you do the least with your "phone" these days is actually call someone?  Or at least your smartphone now does so much more than just act as a telephone that it seems quaint to call it a phone.

Capturing our world via sounds and images is being revolutionized as we see exponential increases in things like resolution, combining still and video capture with sounds, location and more and now being able to photograph things we can't even see such as with this recent development from MIT of cameras that can see around corners. 

With the note that all of these are all technologies which now several years old, as are my posts about them, consider some of the following examples of how rapidly and fundamentally things are changing in these areas:

Adobe and others have also developed cameras and what they call “computational photography” that can gather such complete information on a scene that focus becomes infinite and something we can adjust after the photo is taken. 

Or how about things like Photosynth which can align and stitch together thousands of photos and videos to create a “model” of the whole building or space which you can then walk through.

Add to this the ability to take photos with your “phone” and convert them into 3D models such as with apps like the Autodesk 123D series and how we are starting to see 2D printers replaced by 3D versions capable of "printing" full working 3D assemblies so you can “print” those models you’ve captured and snowflaked them to make them “just right” for you.

Add to the mix things like the Sixth Sense technology

and notions such as The Quantified Self 

and you will start to see how we need to completely rethink and reimagine what “photography” means and consider what we need to learn in order to make smart choices and use the power of these innovations for positive good and gain.

For now start to notice how the use of video is becoming more and more pervasive and consider that as the resolution of video cameras in our “phones” goes up and up, won’t still and video merge into one when you can grab just the perfect “frame” for a video anytime you want a “still photo”.  A little further out what if you don’t need to remember to take a photo or a video of an event before it happens because it you are capturing everything all the time. 

Scary?  You bet!  Exciting?  Absolutely!  Inevitable?  I think so.

Snowflake Effect: Mass Personalization of Manufacturing

Derek Singleton has written a good overview of some good examples of the mass personalization of manufacturing in a recent posting “Anyone can be a Manufacturer” and an earlier one “Three ways to bring Crowdsourcing into Mainstream Manufacturing”.  They are IMHO well worth the read and following some of the links. 

The only significant omission to me. which many seem to miss, is the area of 3D scanning that enables us to capture existing objects in the form of full 3D models which we can then modify and adjust to suit our individual needs and situation before “manufacturing” at a click of a button.  Perhaps Derek will write more on this topic as well.  For now you can see some good examples such as Autodesk’s 123D series of apps for more on this critical component of the Snowflake Effect on manufacturing for the rest of us.

As I’ve been saying in my articles and speaking engagements the last few years, one of the biggest and best examples of how the ubiquitous Snowflake Effect is fundamentally disrupting the present and shaping the future is what I think can rightly be called the Third Industrial Revolution wherein each of us as individuals become empowered to create or manufacture our own “stuff”. 

This revolution is very pervasive and diverse in that sometimes we will literally have a one click manufacturing plant on our desktop along the lines that can already be seen with some of the early 3D printers available.  At the other end of the spectrum it will simply yet powerfully mean that we will play a more and more key role in the design and production of products we create with the assistance of others and higher end services and the myriad of points along this entire DIY (Do It Yourself) spectrum.  I think this will likely proceed along lines similar to how photography and photo printing have evolved where they were initially the domain of experts only to where we used to just take photos and send our film off to be developed and turned into prints to where we now either just click and immediately see the photo results on extremely high resolution screens or hit the print button and soon have a near perfect photo in our hands.

As we begin to similarly capture and print real and complex objects with the simple click of a button we become more intimately involved in the whole process from the initial idea of “Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have one of those.” or “I wish ‘they’ would make something like this.” to the modification and improvement of the object to make it “just right”, just for me, just for now and almost instantaneously have that in our hands.

The instant gratification and production of more “stuff” does NOT excite me and is in fact one of the concerns to be dealt with as we move into this brave new world.  What I am VERY excited about is the degree to which this will in fact involve each of us more directly and intimately in the whole idea-design-test-create-improve cycle.  Think of all the learning this will inspire in us all!  Think about how much more we will understand the materials and energy that go into producing things and the power this new awareness will bring to many as to how to consume less, reuse more and get more out of life. 

How much “stuff” do you have in your life that you don’t use because it never worked well, never fit you properly, never did what it was supposed to do?  Imagine if every “thing” you have is just right, just for you.  Imagine the new skills and knowledge you will need to have and want to have to live life well in this new snowflaked world.  As with all powerful new innovations and discoveries the advent of personalized manufacturing will bring with it equal measures of risks and benefits and it is up to each and everyone ONE of us to choose how we will shape and use these new tools and enablers going forward.

We may curse snowflakes while shoveling billions of them from our driveway or when our car is skidding on compacted ones on roads, yet the almost spiritual beauty of fresh fallen snow and the intricate perfection of each and every unique snowflake evokes emotions deep in our souls and reminds us what a profound gift uniqueness is.  It may be difficult at fist to see such beauty in something as ‘ugly” and conforming as manufacturing has historically been, but these are the traits of the previous forms of manufacturing and why, for me at least, the rapidly evolving Third Industrial Revolution is so powerful, so exciting and yes, so beautiful. 

 

Think about it.  What will you do as these capabilities are put into your hands?  What new skills and knowledge will you need to have to use them wisely and for best benefit?  What new services and support will you need?  How will use these new capabilities for greater good both for the world overall, yourself and the rest of the world’s snowflakes?  As you ponder these kinds of questions, if it doesn’t make you equally excited and scared then I’ve done a very poor job of explaining this.  Hopefully better writers like Derek will help to do a much better job and set off that spontaneous cognitive combustion within you as you have that the Aha! moment of recognition and set of in pursuit of your relentless curiosity to learn and practice more.

Snowflakes Effect Hits Financial Models: Snowflakes funding Snowflakes

The evidence that the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is continuing to build at an exponential rate continues to show up just about everywhere I look. One dimension of the Snowflake Effect that has not received a lot of discussion yet is the financial side if the story; how will the mind boggling numbers of personalized solutions needed every day be funded?  What are the new financial and business models going to be in a Snowflake Effected world?  If as I believe more and more of us are going to become designers and producers and creators by making our own “stuff”, and especially if others are asking us to make and share some for them, how will we pay for this?   Well, why not apply the Snowflake Effect to funding itself?

Microtizing Finance, Credit & Loans

In fact this the Snowflake Effect has already hit funding models already and we are seeing more and more examples and growth of these wild new models.  One of the hallmarks of the Snowflake Effect is breaking things down into very small components whether that be each of us as unique individuals or each unique moment in time or small parts that can be reused and reassembled into infinite numbers of unique new assemblies Lego block style.  This same “microtization” trend is increasingly taking hold of financial models and enabling each of us 7 billion plus snowflakes to not only become designers, creators and producers, we are also becoming financers and funders. 

One example you have likely heard of and many of you are already participating in is that of microloans, microfinance and microcredit.  Essentially this is where once snowflake can loan small amounts of money to another snowflake or individual cause.  As is often the case this is not a new idea or invention but what is new is the scale and reach of these models.  Back in 2006 Kevin Kelly posted this good overview of “Micro-Loans Online” which he introduced by saying:

This year the father of micro-finance and founder of the Grameen Bank won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in inventing and promoting micro-loans in the developing world. A micro-loan is as little as a few hundred dollars invested into a one-person business with minimal qualifications. That tiny borrowed amount can launch a vegetable stand, repair shop, or bicycle taxi -- a living in other words. As each micro-loan is repaid (and most are), the effects of that small goodness are amplified and leveraged by being loaned out and invested again and again. Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.

Snowflake Effect Hits in Financial Models in Developed Regions

Most of these micro loans and micro financing have been focused on dealing with poverty and developing regions and they continue to escalate in both numbers and positive effects.  Somewhat newer and greatly increasing the scope of this Snowflaking of financing is their application to the financing of individuals and small businesses in developed regions and markets.  One of the more noteworthy examples is Kickstarter  which has the tag line of “A new way to Fund & Follow Creativity” and bills itself as being “The world’s largest funding platform for creative projects”.  The model is essentially the same where anyone can pledge any amount, typically one to one hundred dollars, towards a specific project that someone has proposed on the site.  As they point out this is not about lending or investing as each project creator maintains complete control and ownership of their work.  Those who pledge money are also protected because no money changes hands unless the project reaches its funding goal within a set time.

You can check out the Kickstarter web site and Kickstarter blog for more information and examples of the enormous range of ideas, products and services being developed which include everything from software applications to games to art to books to home hardware.

How well is this working?  Well Kickstarter recently had a record setting day with two projects exceeding $1M each in pledges and $1.6M being pledged in 24 hours.  All this from individual snowflakes like you and me.  In fact they had quite the day as they also saw New York’s city council endorse the site as a way to highlight community projects that need funding

It was also noteworthy to me how different the two projects were that exceeded the $1M in pledges.  The TechCrunch review of this eventful day highlighted this nicely:

Often Kickstarter is thought of as a venue for people with very limited means but a good idea to execute that idea. The Elevate Dock is a good example of this.

But Double Fine is an established game studio with office space, employees, and many products under its belt? Why should it go to Kickstarter? Well, Tim Schafer explains that in the video, at least for this project: no publisher would go near a point and click adventure game, but they knew at least some people wanted it. Reasonable enough.

The question, really, is why we even question it. If people want to make something, and people want to fund it, why shouldn’t it be on Kickstarter? The easy stuff — cool accessories or small devices that need a little capital to get started — are just the first wave. Why not pothole repair on a neighbourhood street? Why not a new coffee shop? Why not a feature film? Some of these have been tried, no doubt, and perhaps failed — but the principle is sound:

If you want to make it, and others want you to make it, this is a way for you to connect.

Why not indeed!!  What if the impossible isn’t?

Snowflake Effects on Learning

As you can see then, the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization continues its exponential growth and influence on almost all aspects of our world.  For those of us who look at the world from the perspective of learning, my ongoing question and fascination is with how the needs for each of us as individuals and as societies are changing and being changed by the Snowflake Effect.  The personalization of learning itself such that each learning moment is more successfully and deeply personalized is happening at an equally exponential rate with more examples of this showing up every day.  However an even larger and multiplying effect is the need for a whole new set of skills, knowledge and competencies each of us snowflakes are going to require to survive and thrive in the rapidly evolving new snowflaked world we are creating and will live and learn in.

I fully realize that this all continues to sound unimaginably large and impossible.  And yet as the examples of financial models I’ve highlighted above show, we are surrounded daily by more and more examples of how the impossible isn’t.  The oxymoron of typical Snowflake Effect models that are infinitely scalable AND sustainable turns out to be true!  Or as Kevin Kelly put it; “Micro-loans are the world's only perpetual motion machines.” 

Add enough snowflakes together with these kinds of models and you have a perpetuating avalanche of invention, discovery, creativity, production and happiness.

The Snowflake Effect on the World of Things

NOTE: The following is the second excerpt from the small contribution I was proud to have made to the “Learning Perspectives 2010” collection put out by The Masie Center in memory and commemoration of Jonathan Kays.  (see previous postings for details). 

It is my contention that changes falling resulting from the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization such as the Third Industrial Revolution I covered in the previous posting and the dramatic transformation of “physically real” things are disruptive changes that will shake up and shape our future at a holistic and societal level.  In addition to their direct use and applications to learning my greater concern and excitement is on the new skills, competencies and knowledge required by all of us as “students” living in this world and therefore the challenges and opportunities this presents to learning, education and training.

Enjoy and please add your comments or create your own postings with your reactions!

- Wayne

The Snowflake Effect is causing dramatic changes in the world of things as they rapidly transform from being mass produced to mass personalized and, in the process, become snowflakes themselves. Flexible manufacturing was one of the initial enablers of this transformation, but that was just the beginning. With the advent of more computer-controlled design and machining, and, more recently, the introduction of affordable 3D printers and scanners, we are seeing an increase in the personalization of individual items that can be designed and produced to match the unique context of an individual person/situation for no more - and often for less - cost than previously mass produced things.

This is about disruptive innovation: not disruptive elimination. We do not want or need everything to be unique. Large scale items such as airplanes and cruise ships will likely continue to be produced in quantity; but even now, these items are uniquely built to match the individual customer and be adapted to match some specific routes or conditions. Many large scale items are already being designed and built so that they can be changed over time to match contextual changes, whether predicted or not. For example, several of the world’s naval forces are building their newest ships so that they can be reconfigured to match different contexts of use, like switching from a configuration best suited for military situations to one that better accommodates response to natural disasters.

There will likely always be a need for some mass produced parts. We will still want large numbers of exactly the same thing (like fasteners, screws, nuts, bolts, etc.). There will be instances when many people will want to have the exact same thing and there will continue to be fads around popular books, songs and movies. But these will be at the front end of the Long Tail and small in number. As you move down the curve of the Long Tail, you find that more and more things for more and more people have less and less in common.

For example, even if I really like the pen you just showed me and we can “print” an exact duplicate for me, I might want to modify it a bit - to be shorter, heavier or more curved to better fit my hand and match the way I write. The same dynamics will play out for coffee cups, eyeglasses, shoes, chairs and certainly our learning in both process and content. In this way, there will be an equivalent Long Tail of things and it will be a spectrum with products falling at all points along the exponential curve towards uniqueness. As we are seeing with the Long Tail effect on music, movies, books and the like, the transition will be such that the volume of objects at the unique end of the tail will rise dramatically and become the majority in terms of instances, business and learning.

Above and beyond being mass customized and personalized by their design and production, things are increasingly connected to each other and us as we use them. One version of this is often referred to as “The Internet of Things”. A commonly cited example is the way in which home appliances are being connected to each other and the Internet for everything from monitoring energy use to setting thermostats and timing when to turn things off and on. All the items in your fridge are able to dynamically update their status in terms of how full they are, their expiration date, peak freshness and so on to help you choose what’s best to make for dinner tonight and what to pick up at the grocery store on your way home.

Start to think smaller and smarter: imagine and prepare yourself for things like “smart” and digital dust, dirt, pixels, locations, ink dots and paint. Products or “things” are going to increasingly be snowflakes themselves; alike, perhaps, but no two exactly the same. Just like us, as things become more like snowflakes, they too will start to have their own identity, networks, conversations and even their own “social networks”. Indeed, if you’re paying attention, many already do! But it is the more far reaching and latent effects of these changes - especially those on how, when, where and what we learn - that are most exciting.

The revolution in the world of learning is upon us and it is as daunting as it is exciting and powerful. The best way to predict the future is to design your own; therefore, we can strategically and serendipitously lead the transformation of learning, training and education rather than have it happen to us. By exploring and better understanding current trends and directions of the Snowflake Effect on the world of “things”, we will be able to bring the power of mass personalization to the world of learning. Each of us will be able to experience great learning moments every day.

Related articles

• The Snowflake Effect the Third Industrial Revolution (waynehodgins.typepad.com)
• Snowflake Socialize Your Burger? (waynehodgins.typepad.com)

The Snowflake Effect & the Third Industrial Revolution

NOTE: The following is an excerpt from the small contribution I was proud to have made to the “Learning Perspectives 2010” collection put out by The Masie Center in memory and commemoration of Jonathan Kays.  (see previous posting for details).  This topic and my perspectives on us entering a third Industrial Revolution is one I have been having a great deal of fun presenting and discussing for quite some time now and it seems to be generating some of the most excitement and resonating more profoundly with more people as I’ve done so recently.  My intent with this posting is to provide you with a quick synopsis (consider the source!) of my perspectives on the Snowflake Effect and the resulting Third Industrial Revolution, and then follow with more details and directions I believe this is taking us.  The potential of these changes continue to be a source of great excitement and inspiration for me and I hope it has a similar effect and value for you.

Enjoy and please add your comments or create your own postings with your reactions!

- Wayne

The Snowflake Effect & the Third Industrial Revolution

The overarching theme that will shape the future of not only learning but most all of our societies, organizations and communities is the escalating transformation of our society from one that is shaped by mass production to one that is shaped by mass personalization. For several years now I have synthesized a large number of major trends and patterns into this massive global and societal shift - which I refer to as the Snowflake Effect - that is driving a complete reset of the world as we know it.

Within this context of transformation to mass personalization, a new revolution is coming into focus: a third Industrial Revolution. As with the previous two Industrial Revolutions, this third version is both sculpting and itself being shaped by an emerging society resulting from the mass exodus from a world governed for over a century by mass production to one made up of societies, communities and organizations characterized by pro-active individual members. These people take on increasingly direct roles in the design, creation and use of the new forms of learning. They feed a constant stream of real time data about their reactions, thoughts and ideas, which provide feedback loops for evolutionary self-improvement cycles.

The Snowflake Effect

The Snowflake Effect started with the simple observation that we are all unique individuals: no two are alike, just like snowflakes. What’s more, so too is each moment in time, each situation we are in and each group of people we are with unique. They are distinctive combinations, just like the crystals of a snowflake. This is certainly not a new observation or condition and has arguably been true for as long as we have existed; yet, this poses the intriguing question:

If our uniqueness as individuals is so obvious and has been so true for so long, then why do we live in a world designed on the assumption that we are all the same?

This question has haunted me for many years now, like the small irritant of a grain of sand that causes a pearl to form in an oyster. In this case, my articulation of the Snowflake Effect is the resultant pearl.

One of the results of technology improvements over the past 50 years is that our world is getting smaller as distance and physical separation become lesser issues. We are more connected with more people in more ways than ever before. While we need to continue to work on distributing access to these advances to all of the world’s populations, it is increasingly true that we can communicate, socialize and work with anyone anywhere. We can access food and other products no matter where they come from or what season it is. We live in a world of increasing abundance and the rate of change is exponential. It has hit a tipping point, triggering immense and often seemingly impossible transformation all around us.

From Mass Production to Mass Personalization

In many ways, we can trace this focus on sameness back to the first two Industrial Revolutions and our transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. Initially, mass production only applied to manufacturing, but over the course of a century or more, mass production has expanded and extended to the point where it now permeates and, in many ways, defines the world in which we live. Our thinking and assumptions are largely based on the principles of mass production. Consider for example how we design almost everything. We typically start with a problem or a need that is shared by a large group of people. Given the usual time, energy and cost that creating something new requires, the larger the group, the better. Once we have the design for a product, it is mass produced. If the design is for a service, we put together a process and supporting resources so that same service can be delivered to as many people as possible. This is how most governments, businesses and schools work. Consider how most education models work: with standard objectives, text books, curriculum and schedules. It’s no coincidence that our education models were largely created at the beginning of the first industrial revolution to meet the demands of a new factory work force.

Prior to the first Industrial Revolution, only a privileged few were able to get just what they wanted, whenever they wanted it. With the advent of mass production, it became possible for many people to buy a car, a home and become educated; however, this highly scaled model was made possible by mass producing and delivering the same solution for everyone.

Mass production worked very well and we have spent over 100 years improving and refining it to become a very efficient model. In many ways, we have mass production to thank for the transformation of our world into one of abundance for more and more people. But, in spite of - or perhaps because of - this abundance, the predominance of a mass production mentality is no longer sufficiently meeting our needs. It is at odds with our uniqueness when we only have mass produced choices which must be, by definition, compromises for the solutions we really want. This gap is now being closed as we shift from mass production to mass personalization.

The Snowflake Effect is largely about context-based design and the notion of personalized fit. It is about getting things just right. Products and services have the greatest value when just the right people have just the right things at just the right time in just the right way in just the right place. Just as the answer to most questions usually begins with “it depends”, so too does all design need to be dependent upon our unique personal contexts: the unique sets of conditions and characteristics of any situations that determine how well a solution of any kind fits each of us as unique snowflakes.

In the past, we have accepted any mismatch as perfectly reasonable and the best we can expect within typical constraints like budgets, time, community, family, etc. After all, to think otherwise, to imagine a future where most things are just right for you would mean that we’d need to have a different solution for every person, every day - in fact, most likely many times every day! At the time I am writing this, almost seven BILLION people inhabit the planet, and there are 24 hours in a day. That equates to at least 168 billion unique solutions per day and at least 61.32 trillion unique solutions per year! We all know that is impossible.

Or is it? Such outrageous and exponential scaling certainly will be impossible if we continue to rely on our existing mass production mentality and models, but we are increasingly surrounded by more and more examples and evidence of new models where extreme mass customization is not only possible, but already happening on a previously impossible scale. There exists proof that, both as unique individuals and as groups, we can have just what we need, when, where and how we need it. We are increasingly surrounded by examples of what Kevin Kelly succinctly called “impossible in theory, but possible in practice”. Look at some examples in our everyday life: we are increasingly able to get just the right fit for the music we listen to, the news and information we consume, the clothes we wear, the products we buy and the way we can often find just the right information when we need it. This doesn’t happen often enough, but it is occurring more frequently. Check out the developments in areas like personalized manufacturing with 3D printers and 3D scanners, real time information, recommender systems and others you have probably recently experienced. While it is still very early in this transition and we are still surrounded by more mass production than mass customization, the new models and our new behaviors are evolving with accelerating velocity.

Two key enablers of the Snowflake Effect are mashups and modularity. Mashups, a relatively new term but not a new idea, are a unique assembly of pre-existing items to form a new integrated whole. Modularity refers to having things in very small and interchangeable modules. This can be compared to simple Lego^TM blocks, which can be used to create almost anything imaginable by snapping together new combinations of these pre-made plastic blocks. Think about, for example, how you find and listen to music today: you find individual songs rather than whole albums and you put together your own unique playlists based on personal recommendation systems (that are built upon your unique preferences and recommendations from others). This stands in stark contrast to the previous “mass production” models of buying albums and listening to top 40 radio stations. Similar transitions toward mass customization are happening with what we read, what we watch, who we converse with and how we organize ourselves. Mashups and modularity enable the infinite scalability required by the Snowflake Effect for every person, every day.

Note that mass customization and getting things just right does not eliminate and, in fact, includes some products and services that will still be mass produced and remain the same. There will still be “hits” and fads. We will still have some songs, movies, books, presentations and keynotes that millions, even billions, of us are universally drawn to and find valuable; however, these will no longer be the most common or the most used resources. Instead, we will have a very full spectrum of the “Long Tail”, a concept from retail that describes a strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities, usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities: http://www.longtail.com/. These range from huge hits on one end to completely unique, extremely personalized items on the other end. The big change will be an inversion of where the greatest volume of solutions, products and services are found along the curve of the Long Tail, with the vast majority of what we each choose to use coming more and more from the unique end of the tail. The total volume of low popularity items already dramatically exceeds the volume of high popularity items in areas like books, music and video. This trend will dramatically increase; we will continuously find individual items and mash them together in the marvelously messy mix of choices we make.

The 3^rd Wave: Industrial Revolution 3.0 = Learning Revolution 3.0?

The third Industrial Revolution is driving this change. I make this observation in part based on a book published in 1980 by Alvin Toffler called The Third Wave. I have long believed that Toffler was an extremely prescient author, seeing the changes looming ahead. I also believe that even he underestimated the time it would take for these changes to visibly emerge along with the effects they would produce. I’ve most often referred to Toffler’s earlier book Future Shock, published in 1970, where he created the portmanteau word “prosummer” by combining producer with the word consumer. Toffler coined this term to describe the future society he saw where we would not be neatly dived into categories of active producers and passive consumers; instead, these would blur and merge as we all became inextricably and intimately intertwined with the processes of creating. While this has taken much longer than Toffler anticipated, everyone reading this article is a living example of a prosumer. We are all becoming much more active and passionate participants in designing and building our respective futures. I can’t imagine a more positive pattern that bodes well for all of our futures to be bold and bright.

It is Toffler’s book Third Wave, however, which contains the most significant and relevant observation affecting the future of learning and our world. Toffler did not directly refer to a third Industrial Revolution and simply referred to a Third Wave, however he did outline just such a revolution. The Wikipedia entry defines the three waves as:

· Toffler’s First Wave as the settled agricultural society which prevailed in much of the world after the Neolithic Revolution which replaced hunter-gatherer cultures.

· The Second Wave was the Industrial Age society, which began in Western Europe with the Industrial Revolution and subsequently spread across the world. Key aspects of Second Wave society are the nuclear family, a factory-type education system and the corporation.

Toffler wrote:

“The Second Wave society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine these things with standardization, centralization, concentration and synchronization and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”

· The Third Wave is the post-industrial society. Toffler says that since the late 1950s most countries have been in transition from a Second Wave society into a Third Wave society.

Thirty years later, this Third Wave is in fact a Third Industrial Revolution. It started back in the 1950s and has been slowly but exponentially increasing. We are now at its tipping point and seeing the more startling and dramatic changes being produced. Contemporary examples include such things as 3D scanning and 3D “printing”, which enable us to copy, modify and print any physical object, including those that are complete working assemblies, like motors, pumps, watches and anything else that strikes our fancy.

More recently (April 2010) urban theorist Richard Florida has put forward many similar views of a third revolution in his book “The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Posterity”. Florida provides some good historical background on the previous two Industrial Revolutions and an analysis of how current world economic situations are contributing to the third one. Florida does a good job of debunking many common myths and The Great Reset details his observations on the changing social characteristics and geographical concentration of creative knowledge workers in mega-regions around the world and the need for a very different and highly mobile work force. Overall Florida adds to those pointing to the need for an equally great reset of our education and training systems and the way we learn in general.

The third Industrial Revolution will require an equal or greater revolution in education, training and learning to fulfill and drive the new forms of creation and our new societies. What does this really mean in terms of learning and performance? One good outline of some skills and competencies required by this Third Industrial Revolution can be found in Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind[1]. Dan describes the shift from skills and competencies required by the former Industrial Revolution - which are mostly associated with the left side of the brain (i.e. analysis, sequential reasoning and text) - to a focus on right brain skills and competencies (i.e. synthesis, holistic reasoning, context, images, design and pattern recognition).

The question for learning professionals and organizations - the question the rest of Learning Perspectives 2010 explores - is what will YOUR role be in this process? Will you lead or follow? Will you shape or be shaped? Will you be part of the solution or part of the problem?

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§ [1] See also Elliott Masie’s Interview of Daniel Pink at http://www.learning2007.com/university/2005/8/10/dan-pink-interview-a-whole-mind-audio-podcast-text-transcript-new.html

Video Mashups for the Masses?

A recently funded new company called Sunday Sky is worth keeping an eye on for its potential to augment learning and content.  Another one of those simple yet powerful ideas I think and what Sunday Sky does is to automatically turn your web content into videos. 

More difficult to describe than to just learn by example so check out this example of how ePlans.com an architectural home plan design company is using this.  Click on the video obviously and you’ll quickly see how Sunday Sky has enabled them to convert what would have been separate and rather static home plans and pictures and assembled them into a mashup collection in video format.

No doubt we will see commercial sites such sa ePlans use this first but start to think about how YOU could use this ability to convert some of your content into different formats such as video to make them more accessable, more compelling, more engaging and more customized to fit each individual you are reaching.

As per my mentioning here several times before I’m a big fan of the RSA animations and so this Sunday Sky example has me wondering if there might be a way for “the rest of us” to be able to take some of our content and have it automagically converted into a video along the lines of an RSA animation?

Anyway, wanted to bring this recent example to your attention of how mashups are enabling the Snowflake Effect of mass customization to reach more and more people in more and more ways. 

 

Related articles

• SundaySky Automatically Turns Web Content Into Videos, Raises $9 Million (techcrunch.com)
• Heres a Good Idea: (waynehodgins.typepad.com)

Snowflake & SocialSize Your Burger?

I do love how serendipity continues to lead me to great and unexpected discoveries and here is but one of the latest examples which I think and hope has some value for you too.

 As you may know I’ve been out sailing in some remote spots (aren’t they all?) in the SW Pacific for the past year with mostly just my sat phone for connectivity so now that I’m stopped here in Majuro in the the Marshall Islands I’m enjoying my first decent WiFi connection to the web and a chance to do some serendipitous rich surfing.

It started when I was catching up to some of my Email backlog and my friend Marcia put me onto a new book called “I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works” by Nick Bolton.  After downloading the Kindle version and giving it a quick read I think many of you will also enjoy Nick’s writing and insights and wanted to pass it along to you here.

 

In the book Nick writes about how he sees our shift as a "personal 'digital metamorphosis.'” which is fundamentally changing how we live, work, communicate, learn and think. He picks up on a key issue I’ve been focusing on more lately which is the fallicy, IMHO of what he calls being “"multiple multitasking multitaskers”.

I’ve also been talking and writing for many years about the transformation we’ve been making over the past fifty years or so to a society of “prosumers” as Alvin Toffler nicely put it, and Bolton talks here about a new type of consumer, the “consumnivore,” resulting from living in a world where immediacy trumps quality and quantity. 

I linked you (above) to the Amazon site for this book because their “Product Summary” provides a good summary of the key points to the book and you can also read some of the comments from others who have reviewed the book which I often find to be insightful.  I’ll wait while you jump over there to get the synopsis ……………………..

 

The next step in the cascading waterfalls of serendipity was when I happened to check out the author Nick Bilton. As many of you may already know but I obviously didn’t, Nick is the Lead Technology Writer for The New York Times Bits Blog and a reporter for the paper. With a background that spans design, user interface, journalism and hardware hacking and having previously worked as a researcher in The Times R&D Labs, looking at the media landscape 2-10 years, no wonder I was drawn to him.

Reading through Nick’s blog led me to this recent posting which was itself about his NYT article “Making A Social Media Burger”.  Both well worth reading as they are about his visit to a new “healthy fast food restaurant” that just opened in New York.  I’m not so sure about the healthy part nor am I a fan of putting fast and food together in any case but here’s the crux of Nick’s (and my) interest and why a techie is writing about food:

• with hamburgers shaped like doghnuts (read the article) Nick’s burger was as he put it “from the future:  my burger was created on the Internet and broadcast to Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, part of a multiplayer online game, and my order was checked in by a receptionist with an iPad.”

 

• “Once you place your order, you can give it a name and off you go to pick it up. And this is where the game aspect comes in. 4Food has a leaderboard that shows the most-ordered burger. That turns it into a social networking food game.

 

• Here’s how it works: I create a burger, call it “The Bits Burger” and broadcast it to Twitter or Facebook. Each time someone orders my special creation, I get 25 cents credit in the restaurant and my burger rises up the leaderboard. The more customers order my burger, the higher it goes and the more credits I get, until I’m eating free.”

More rooted in the present, Nick also noted that:

“In addition to a connected burger, the space is as plugged-in as you will find: there are more power outlets in 4Food  than I’ve seen in the lighting and electronics aisle at Home Depot. And of course there will be free Wi-Fi too.”

I stumble over what I regard as Snowflake Effect examples like this every day, and I’m out here in the middle of the South Pacific!  I’ve got to believe it is happening even more dramatically for those of you who are living in much larger centers and so much more connected than I.  As with so many others, this Snowflaked burger example is both severely social and personalized and yet more proof IMHO of how the Snowflake Effect is becoming more and more pervasive.  Bon appétit mes amis!

 

Country or Community or Neither?

Maps are such a big part of my life as I experience the world via my sailboat so the TechCrunch posting XKCD Updates Its Map: We No Longer Live In Actual Countries But Digital Ones provided some serious fun for me this morning looking at this updated map for 2010 and this previous 2007 Map of Online Communities from XKCD.  These maps show online communities as countries with size based on the volume of daily social activity. 

It is both a fun perspective on the world we live in and very useful to support the trend I’ve been talking about for many years that the whole notion of national boundaries is fading fast relative to their importance and relevance in our daily life.  Let me be quick to point out that I am not in any way suggesting that national boundaries will be eliminated or forgotten nor that we will be any less proud of your national heritage.

But in terms of what matters in our daily lives as we go about living, learning and working together I think we are all seeing more and more examples where national boundaries matter less and less.  The country of origin of a person, product or service matters less and less to us compared to their fit and match to our unique needs and preferences.

Think about it, in your conversations and correspondence over the past week which have you mentioned more often; what country you are from or what online community you are from?

I’m certainly pleased and proud to be Canadian for example and just sent out a Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (Oct.11th) wish to one and all.  But guess where and how I sent it?  My blogs, Facebook, Twitter and all done from the cockpit of s/v Learnativity here in Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands group. (07 06.274 N, 171 22.358 E)

I would also point out a related pattern that the importance of and the differences between the physical and the digital, between the real and the virtual, between the geographic location and the online location, are also becoming less and less relevant and distinct. We can and should start dropping them as qualifiers in our conversations. Just like we are less likely to feel the need to point out that we are calling someone from our car or an airplane and focus on the conversation at hand, we will have less need to add that some thing, or even some one, is digital or online or Canadian and focus more on having the right people and things connected together at the right time and way to meet the unique needs of the moment.

Perhaps more importantly it seems to me that communities matter more than countries.  I don’t see this as anything uniquely modern or new or digital.  Reflecting back on human history one could argue that communities have often been more important than nationalities.  What is new however is the reduced need to factor things like location or nationality or digital into our daily decisions.  They are not irrelevant, just less relevant. 

Taking an even longer view, which is my nature, I see all single point categorization such as nationality, gender, age group, digital, real, and so on, fading in importance and relevance as we instead use these as bits of metadata or characteristics which number in the hundreds, millions and centillions (10⁶⁰⁰) and which we combine into mashups and mine to help us make faster better decisions and help us avoid stereotyping and other forms of mass production thinking.

While not without new problems and challenges I for one see all these changes as a VERY good thing and a major step forward by providing more ways and opportunities for all of us to help make this a better world to live, love and work within.

In any case, have fun wandering and pondering these maps.