Off Course-On Target

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.

Is Fit “It” When it comes to Great Learning!?

In what has become almost a mantra for me, one of the ways I often synthesize my focus on the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is getting to “just right”; just the right things for just the right person at just the right time in just the right way on just the right medium, in just the right context…………… well, you get the idea. For the past few years what I’ve been finding is that this can all be taken down to a single word and concept; fit.

When you think about it, a good fit is essentially defined as getting it just right, just for you, just at that moment. This could be for something simple like a favorite shirt, or sweater or pair of shoes. You know the ones we tend to choose over all others whenever we can because when we wear them, and often wear them out, they fit us just right and make us feel just right. Often they are not in the best condition, the “fashionable” choice at the time or other factors more commonly used to make such choices. Yet, because our favorites fit so well and make us feel so good we choose them whenever possible. Great fit is also a lot like that comment about great art; I don’t know how to describe it but I know it when I see it. Great fit is extremely elusive and deeply personal It has been no surprise to me then to also observe that this context and concept of fit works very well for many other and perhaps more profound examples such as one’s life style, personal relationships and learning.

Fit for Me

As some of you may know for the past few years I’ve been conducting a personal experiment by setting off on a grand adventure to see the world from the perspective of the world’s oceans by living aboard my sailboat Learnativity.  So I’m typing this up sitting in the shade of my cockpit right now as I’m anchored off the small island of Malo near Neiafu in the Vava’u Group of islands in the Kingdom of Tonga and you can paste the lat/long of 18 39 56.2 S, 173 58 56.2 W into Google Earth or maps to see where that is and if you’re interested you can learn all about that on my Learnativity blog. 

However the reason I mention this is one of my examples of the use of fit.  What has been the biggest surprise to me of my adventures so far is how well this strange new life style and experiences fits me. I don’t come from any ancestral background of mariners, didn’t grow up around boats or the sea, and didn’t have any lifelong dream of sailing nor previous sailing experience. It is all very new and foreign to me. Yet it fits me to a T for some reason; the independence and freedom on one hand, the complete self reliance and dependence on myself I have for everything from navigation to power to water to food and everything in between.  I was guided to it by using serendipity as my guide, listening to my heart and my gut more than my head, and by paying attention to how well things fit as the way to know which way to go, what was working and what wasn’t, what to say yes to and when to say no.

Fit as a way to Better and Greater Learning?

In the case of learning, it seems clear to me that a great fit is necessary for great learning to take place. We learn the best and the most when it is just right for us, just at that time, just in that context. Great learning then seems to also condense down to getting the best fit. What fits you best at any one time won’t likely fit me best. What fits you best today won’t likely fit you best tomorrow because some of the conditions and context have changed. Perhaps this will help you understand why I am so focused, some would say obsessed, for the past many years with the critical need to transform most learning methods from those based on mass production and sameness to ones of mass personalization and uniqueness; the Snowflake Effect.

Think back to some of your most recent moments when you experienced truly great learning of some kind, often very serendipitously in that it wasn’t planned or expected. What made that learning so great for you? What was different about that moment and the many others when it didn’t work? In the literally thousands of times I’ve posed this question to individuals I’m speaking with they initially struggle to explain it yet almost always end up describing how it was just the right choice of words or pictures or experience at just the right time, when they were in just the right frame of mind, etc. In other words, when the learning was just the right fit.

Therefore I’d like to encourage all of us to consider using “fit” in this context and as a way to determine what characterizes great learning. What are the parameters we can use to determine fit when it comes to learning? Perhaps we are best to use things like outcomes and results to measure the learning itself, but these are all after the learning takes place. For me at least, the bigger question is how do we increase not only the frequency of truly great learning experiences for every person on the planet? And for that, the use of fit is extremely helpful.

Exponentially Increasing the Frequency of Great Learning Experiences

One of the more troubling trends I’ve long noticed is that when the conversation of great learning moments comes up, it is a very revealing and rewarding conversation until you ask when you last had a great learning moment or how many have you had in your life. The answers are troubling to me because they are usually many years ago and a number that leaves many fingers unused. Therefore, one of the questions (I have several) that figuratively keep me awake at night and gets me out of bed every morning is how do we change this? How do we increase the frequency of great learning experiences? And incremental increases, while welcome just won’t do it for me because I think it is possible, and I might argue necessary, to exponentially increase the frequency of great learning; from a few experiences in a lifetime to many of them every day, for every person!

How is this even imaginable you ask? The topic of many more conversations to come to be sure, but in short my awareness and attention to finding and determining the best fit has helped me increase the frequency of my great learning experiences. I wanted to share this with you so you can try this concept of “fit” on for size yourself, and see if paying attention to fit and what makes for a good fit, helps you experience more great learning moments? What does fit mean to you in this context? What are its key characteristics? And the list goes on.

Can’t wait to hear back from you in your comments, your writings and our future conversations.

Wayne & Ruby the Wonderdog
Aboard s/v Learnativity
18 39 56.2 S, 173 58 56.2 W
Neiafu, Vava'u, Kingdom of Tonga

Email:    [email protected]
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Skype:    whodgins
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The Snowflake Effect on the World of Things

Look around you; anything that isn’t made by nature had to be designed and built by we mere humans and what I’ll be referring to here as “things”. 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, are becoming snowflakes themselves.

In the coming weeks and months, I’d like to explore this very large and influential meta trend of both the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization and specifically the effect on “things”. My interest in doing so is that I believe this is ushering in a new era, what some have referred to as the “Next Industrial Revolution”, and even more so than the “first” Industrial Revolution I believe that this next one will cause and require an even more profound revolution in the world of learning, education and training for all of us.

Flexible manufacturing was one of the initial enablers of this transformation from mass production to mass customization, however this was barely the beginning. With the advent of more and more computer controlled design and machining, and more recently the introduction of affordable 3D printers and scanners, we are seeing an exponential increase in the personalization of individual items which can now be both designed and produced to match the unique context of the individual person and situation for no more and often less cost that previous mass produced things.

The Long Tail of Things

As striking as these changes are and will be, let’s PLEASE avoid our history of believing that each new era will completely eliminate all of what has come before. This is about disruptive innovation not disruptive elimination. We do not want or need every thing to be unique. Large scale items such as airplanes and cruise ships for example will likely continue to be produced in quantity, but even now these items are largely uniquely built to match the individual customer and be adapted to match some specific routes or conditions. Many such large scale items are already being designed and built such that they can be changed over time to match a contextual change, predicted or not. For example, several of the world’s Navies are building their newest ships in such a way that they can be reconfigured to match different contexts of use such as switching from a configuration that is best for a military situation to responding to a natural disaster.

There will also likely be a need for some mass produced parts where large numbers of exactly the same thing is just what we want such as with fasteners like screws, nuts and bolts. For an even longer time yet there will be instances where many people will want to have the exact same thing and there will continue to be fads and hits such as 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 exponential curve of the Long Tail, you get to more and more things for more and more people which have less and less in common.

Even if I really like the pen you just showed me and we can “print” one “just like it”, I will often want to modify it a little bit to better fit me. I’ll want it to be a bit shorter or more curved to better fit my hand, match the way I write or a be a bit heavier to match my personal preferences. The same dynamics will play out if this were a coffee cup, a pair of eyeglasses, a pair of shoes, or a chair. 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. However 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 down at the unique end of the tail will rise dramatically and become the majority in terms of both instances, business and learning.

The Internet of Things

Above and beyond being mass customized and personalized by their design and production, things are increasingly connected, networked and interconnected to each other and to ourselves 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 net for everything from monitoring energy use, setting thermostats, timing of when best to turn things off and on. Or where all the items in your fridge are dynamically updating 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. But as we’ll cover in future articles, “you ain’t seen nothing yet”! Start to think smaller and smarter and imagine and prepare yourself for things like “smart” and digital dust, dirt, pixels, locations, ink dots and paint. More on each of this in posts to follow.

Things are Becoming Snowflakes Too

In short products or “things” are going to increasingly be snowflakes themselves; alike perhaps but no two exactly the same. And just like us as unique individuals, as things become more like snowflakes, they too will start to have their own identity, their own networks, their own conversations and even their own “social networks”. Indeed, if you’re paying attention, many already do! One of many future topics we will cover here.

Snowflake Things Need Snowflake People & Learning

However it is the more far reaching and more latent effects of these changes, especially those on how, when, where and what we learn that excite me and motivate me to initiate this conversation with you. If these trends have not already captured your curiosity and fascination as they have mine, then I think they soon will and I hope to help in that process.  We need to seriously and deeply reconsider things such as core competencies and skills required for a world where mass personalization replaces mass production.  We need to rethink and redesign things like learning, teaching, training, content and the like to take advantage of the increasing new capabilities of mass personalization and have have personalized learning experiences be the norm for everyone every day.  As we gain the ability to do such things as copy, replicate, modify and mash up pretty much everything, not just the 2D and digital worlds, as easily as we now do with books, documents, music and video, we will face challenges such as what does original mean, is there a role for such things as copyright anymore and if you can have anything you want at your fingertips in an instant, what DO you really want and more so need?  All these some of the questions prompting me to start this conversation and to cover in the coming weeks and months.

Just as it was the change from an agrarian society to an industrial one that produced most of our current models for learning, education and training, so too will this next era shape us as a society both locally and globally. The revolution in the world of learning, and make no mistake it is truly deserving of this often overused word, is upon us and it is as daunting as it is exciting and powerful. Yet as has often been said, the best way to predict the future is to design your own, and it is my sincere hope and conviction that collectively, 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 such that each of us experience and help others to experience great learning moments every day.

Getting to "just right" getting closer

A recent posting on TechCrunch "Check-Ins, Geo-Fences, And The Future Of Privacy" had a good summary of the balancing act between privacy and geo-location and worth a quick read.  The addition location related information is a key component to the critical addition of context required by the the Snowflake Effect principal of getting things "just right" as in just the right stuff to just the right person at just the right time on just the right device in just the right way.  However there is, and likely always will be, the need to keep this location based information in context itself so that your location information is being used when you want it, with whom you want it and where it will add value.  And it can't require too much explicit input or action on our part as we simply won't remember and won't take the time and trouble to do so all the time which severely reduced the value for us and others.  So we need all the help we can get to help us make smart decisions and do so as automatically as possible yet all the while maintaining the various levels of control each of us will want, which in itself is a context based "it depends" type decision that is constantly changing.

And we are getting more and more help with all these decisions from many sources and each of us have an growing army of support in the form of other people and all their input as well as devices that are finally beginning to gain some "smarts" and be able to do more than what we explicitly tell them to do.

It was therefore most interesting to me to read the comment:

As apps and mobile devices become more geo-aware, a balance will need to be struck between the over-sharing creepiness of constant location broadcasting in the background and the annoyance of the constant check-in chore. On Tuesday, at our Disrupt conference, Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox described a future where phones are “contextually aware” so that they can “check into flights, find deals at grocery stores,” and do other things for us at that right place, at the right time. “These things take a bunch of clicks now—it’s all wasting time,” he said. “The phone should know what we want.”

And in other location related news:

Latitude’s New Dashboard View Is Exactly What Passive Location Needs

Tweetdeck Adds Location Column, Integrates Foursquare

Friends Around Me IPhone/iPad App Lets You Interact With Friends Or Strangers, Just Like They Were Really There

Context and contextual awareness IS the next great frontier when it comes to technology advancements and the continued exponential rate the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is increasing.

Wayne

via snowflakeeffect.wordpress.com

Pandora still out of the box?

My first and still favorite music recommender system, Pandora has been struggling to survive and has had several near death experiences over the past 10 years.  So I’ve been delighted to see a flurry of reports in the past few weeks about how things have recently changed for the better for Pandora. See the list at the end of this post for several of these recent reports.  Perhaps what I found even more valuable was the larger lessons which emerge from the Pandora story such as how to survive by being agile and adaptive and how perseverance, both on the part of both the founder and CEO Tim Wetergren and all the many employees who stayed with him through the troubled times and in many cases going years without paychecks, really does win out.

Pandora was one of the first tangible examples Erik Duval and I seized upon and used when showing others what The Snowflake Effect looked like and proof that it was possible.  Pandora truly lived up to its mythical name and let the Snowflake Effect genie out of the box for good for Erik and I. 

While I continue to watch and experiment with many other music recommender systems such as Last.fm, Slacker, and Spotify, I’ve always found that Pandora does the best job of helping me find just the right songs at just the right time, which is at the heart of the premise and the promise of the mass customization and personalization of The Snowflake Effect.  Others prefer to find music based on the tastes of others by adding and mining data from social networks to their tools, but for me I’m looking for music that matches my tastes, moods and context and Pandora, with its Music Genome Project database containing intricate details of each song, seems to do do this best.
*  See “The Song Decoders” NYT article for an interesting insight into the people doing this work.

Music is but one of the almost infinite areas where we are seeing the transformation from a culture of mass production to one of mass customization and personalization.  Experiencing the difference between finding songs and artists via a service such as Pandora compared to something like Top 40 radio is one of the most compelling ways of seeing this transformation which will help you see just how powerful and how real this transformation is and will be.  We are already seeing similar examples of how we can have similar “decision support” in finding the best books to read, sites to visit, people to talk to.

If music recommender systems are new to you or it has been a while since you have tried them, I’d encourage you to check them out and see if they don’t help you find just the right songs, just for you, and in doing so give you a glimpse of the Snowflake Effect future before us.

 

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Rethinking maps, photos and search

MS Adds much more than Bling to Bing Maps

I continue to be impressed by all the great work coming out of Microsoft Research the past year or more and this presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas shows some of the most recent examples.  They are certainly providing great answers to my constant asking of “What if the Impossible Isn’t?”

I picked up on Blaise and the work he and his crew were doing over a year ago, initially with their creation of the Seadragon technology which they brought with them when they joined MS research and used it to create Photosynth which continues to amaze and impress me as well.

It seems like much of their research is centered around visual computing and interfaces and in my post a few days ago “Seeing is Believing 2.0?” I mentioned two other MS Research projects in this area, Pivot and SecondLight.  Today this presentation by Blaise is online from the TED 2010 conference where he shows how they are integrating a lot of technology including Flickr, Seadragon and Photosynth along with some Augmented Reality into Bing maps to enable some amazing new capabilities and possibilities.

Watch the video and I think you too will be impressed not only at the technology but with the new level of functionality and value these mashups are driving into maps.  It is really the whole area of using location as the grounding context for a huge array of other information and uses.

The New Frontier?  Going Inside

In one of my original postings on Photosynth I suggested/hoped that what we would see next was an ability a bit like a “cosmic zoom” * where we could zoom either up or down almost infinitely.  Up into the cosmos of space and down onto not only the street but inside of buildings and then below into the sea. 

* If you’ve never seen Cosmic Zoom, or it has been a while since you watched this 1968 video/animation from the National Film Board of Canada, I’ve embedded it at the bottom so you can treat yourself.

As usual change is occurring exponentially so it looks like Microsoft already has my wish!  As you’ve hopefully just seen in the video above Bing maps now provide an inside view capability where we can go from the outside street views into the inside of buildings.  They gain this in part by having dedicated “backpack cams” which can be taken inside public buildings and places to provide detailed inside views.  But my real excitement is about the ability to “go inside” via all the geo tagged photos from “the rest of us” that are posted to Flickr.  This is where the power of Photosynth really shows some promise to me as it stitches together any number of photos by aligning them in 3D space such that we end up with a highly integrated patchwork of all these interrelated photos.  This scales extremely well when you think of how many photos there are in Flickr (5,384 posted in the last MINUTE, 2.2 million geotagged the past month) and the Seadragon technology allows this to all happen extremely fast and with no apparent slowdown no matter how images are involved.  You’ll also see in the demo how they are able to add in video including a live feed that is similarly aligned within the maps and photos.  Imagine when (surely not if) there is the ability to similarly include all the videos up on the web and not “just” photos.

Look Up!

As if this wasn’t all more than enough to continue my fascination, it looks like they are also addressing my cosmic zoom up wish as well.  At the very end of the video Blaise was out of time but managed to demo an upcoming integration of Worldwide Telescope into Bing maps.  I what i thought was a very intuitive implementation you can simply look up into the sky to start seeing the imagery and data of the night sky from wherever you are standing (on the map). 

Location as Context

As I mentioned at the beginning I think we need to start thinking less about these as “maps” or at least redefine what maps are as we evolve more ways to use location as a central form of context within which we work with an view data, especially visual data.  Time is another bit of context and while it is not shown in the video above, because all the photos and imagery is time stamped you can go back and forth in time as well to see what things looked like in the past and then by adding layers on top, Augmented Reality, we can also see future scenarios such as buildings and reconstruction for example.  Blaise mentioned in the early part of his demo that they have found examples where Photosynth has included some very old photos and by setting the time back they are able to see the streets of Seatlle with horses and carriages. 

Rethinking & Redefining

So as you are thinking about all these new capabilities start to think how this is all part of fundamentally redefining or notion of maps and more so of search, (think spatial) and how we are quickly transfoming from consumer to creators.  These and other changes are also tranforming how we find, discover and learn just the right people, things, locations at just the right time.

PS.  FWIW, keep your eyes on both what’s coming out of MS Research as well as what lies ahead for the increased amount of collaboration between Microsoft, Yahoo, Flickr and Facebook.

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The Promise of a Personal Assistant is growing

I’ve long lamented the fact that for all the computing power we have at our avail, and in spite of it growing exponentially, it still seems that it is all quite “dumb” in terms of not knowing much about me, my situation, my habits, etc.  I wrote about this back in the 90’s that it was like having an assistant with no memory and no learning ability.  You had to teach them, each time, how to do everything you wanted them to do,  But it seemed inevitable that in the future we would see this change as computers and applications got smarter.  We’ve seen some progress in the years since but it has been mostly on that initial low and flat feeling part of exponential change and I think we are just about to hit the inflection or tipping point in this area. 

One indicator is the recent announcement below from Siri of their voice based assistant app.  It shows much promise and will help you see the distinction between mere voice recognition and voice based assistance. The assistance part comes when the app is able to not just recognize what you said but to interpret it and take actions as a result.  For example it hear you say “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio tomorrow night at 7.” and it will do everything from finding the closest Il Fornaio restaurant, display driving directions on a map and book the reservation for two.  There is still much work to be done to make this more ubiquitous and find ways of hooking into many other services, but it is a significant step towards true smart assistance that we all need and I’m optimistic that the exponential curve of the Snowflake Effect of mass customization and personalization continues to shoot every upward.

Siri Launches Voice-Powered iPhone ‘Assistant’

• By Dylan F. Tweney February 5, 2010

A new app invites you to command your iPhone in the same way that Captain Kirk addressed the Enterprise’s computer.

Siri's visual interface displays a transcription of what you say, then hands the data off to an appropriate web service or search engine.

Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-recognition startup, launched an iPhone app incorporating its technology on Friday. With the app running, you can address requests to your phone verbally, asking it things like, “Will it rain today?” or “Where is a good place for pizza nearby?” and “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio tomorrow night at 7.” The Siri app parses the sound, interprets the request, and hands it off to an appropriate web service, such as OpenTable, Yelp, CitySearch, and so on. It displays the results onscreen as it goes, giving you a chance to correct or adjust your request via onscreen taps.

It’s the most sophisticated voice recognition to appear on a smartphone yet. While Google’s Nexus One offers voice transcription capabilities — so you can speak to enter text into a web form, for instance — the Nexus One doesn’t actually interpret what you’re saying.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/siri-voice-recognition-iphone/##ixzz0f5YzoxB8

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