Author: JP

… I plan to visit Kensal Green Cemetery again. Haven’t done so in over 25 years. The last time I did it, sometime in 1982, I didn’t get the chance to see all I wanted to. Some people have this real thing about cemeteries, I am not one of them. Until I discovered Kensal Green Cemetery, South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta was the only one for me. It was close to where I was born, close to where I grew up, close to my school, close to my college, close to the people and things I cared about. There were many days when I went to visit friends “cutting through” the cemetery even though I didn’t need to, there was such a sense of history there.

Kensal Green Cemetery is in a different class. Here’s a sample of the people buried or cremated there:

Charles Babbage, the man behind the difference engine; Charles Blondin, acrobat and tightrope walker; Robert Brown (of Brownian motion fame); Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Wilkie Collins, of The Moonstone and The Woman In White; George Cruikshank, the Dickens illustrator; Leigh Hunt, the writer of Abou ben Adhem, whose tribe may increase; Freddie Mercury; Terence Rattigan of The Winslow Boy and Separate Tables; Howard Staunton, who gave us the Staunton chess pieces; William Makepeace Thackeray; Anthony Trollope, creator of Barsetshire.

And two other people. Thomas Daniell and his nephew William Daniell, the reasons why I went there in the first place. Here’s a sample of the Daniells’ output:

Calcutta used to be a City of Palaces. The Daniells were the ones that let me see what used to be, and what could be again, as I walked the streets in my youth. So I will go back to Kensal Green Cemetery sometime this month. And yes, I will be back at South Park Street as well, sometime in the next twelve months. Been too long.

There was a strange story making the rounds a few years ago: apparently someone had thought up the idea of etching images of house flies on public urinals; boys being boys and men being men, they “took aim”. And suddenly “spillage” was reduced by lots and lots. You can see the story here.

When I was reading that in 2005, I’d already become obsessed by the Clay Shirky mantra about damage and repair: if you can keep the cost of repair at least as low as the cost of damage, then things that are “in the commons” are less likely to have tragic (as in Garrett Hardin) consequences. Well that’s my wording and interpretation anyway, apologies if I’ve got anything wrong.

What it did was make me think slightly differently about design. I started considering opportunities to reduce the cost of repair by minimising the need for repair. From a design perspective, what could we do to reduce the likelihood of damage and thereby reduce the cost of repair?

As serendipity would have it, I was thinking about these things while waiting for the flight back from Copenhagen, and found this in the men’s washroom at the lounge:

So it wasn’t just Schiphol airport where you could go up and see someone’s etchings in the washroom. Anyway, seeing it made me think about other places where the design of something reduces wastage and obviates the need for repair. And that made me think of this:

Now that’s a photograph of a room in the Wine Residence in Shanghai, a wonderful place where you can acquire wine, store it, taste it, learn about it and even trade it. I was taken around it by a close friend, and I loved the built-in spittoons. What did I like about it? Well, I’d seen spittoons being used in places where you learn about wine before, but they were usually set apart from where you were. You had to go to the spittoon. I come from India, where a lot of people chew betel leaf and betel nut.

And while spittoons can be found occasionally, what you tend to see is dried-blood scars on walls and floors in public places, as people aimed for the spittoons and missed. Here’s a sample (actually taken from the Solomon Islands, not India, but the point remains. My thanks to Everything Everywhere, Flickr and Creative Commons):

Where is all this taking me? It’s Sunday and I’m thinking lazily, provisionally. I started wondering whether Mac desktops used to be “dirtier” before someone thought of putting the Trash can there. Whether personal information would be more accurate if we presented the tools for repairing the information more usefully. That kind of thing.

If we take design seriously, we need to work harder at reducing the cost of repair. Sometimes that means doing what we can in design to reduce the need for repair.

I had been looking forward to meeting Umair Haque at Supernova a few weeks ago. But it was not to be; sadly, Umair’s mother was ill and so, quite understandably, he couldn’t make it.

There are many reasons for my wanting to meet Umair; just take a look at what Terry Heaton wrote about him some months ago and you’ll get what I mean.

My disappointment was short-lived: unable to turn up, Umair posted this article instead: A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution. Great article, excellent food for thought. Here are some excerpts:

Creative destruction has two sides – the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff are going to sharpen. The price of growth, it seems, is a world that’s always riskier, more uncertain, and more brutal at the margin.

…

Consider this. When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.

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Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble?

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Here’s the answer: marginal starvation. Lives are lost.

…

If that’s 21st century capitalism – maybe it’s time for a revolution.

All this got me thinking. The turbulence that Umair speaks of, the successive bubbles, these are not theories any more, they’re here. We’re seeing acceleration and spiking in creative output, we’re also seeing the same acceleration and spiking in the cost of destruction.

When human lives become part of the “cost of destruction” something is seriously wrong. And we need to change our views and values, in some fundamental way. I remember attending the inaugural Esther Dyson Flight School some years ago, where the incomparable Freeman Dyson (her father), spoke. He talked about heady days in the late 40s when physicists were excitedly contemplating the use of nuclear power to launch rockets and to extend their reach, a time when we didn’t know enough about the consequences. Then it all changed. Which was a good thing.

We have already learnt two important lessons from innovation, particularly when democratised or opensource:

• how to keep the costs of failure low (as in Jeff Clavier’s quote here or Josh Kopelman’s here)
• how to keep the costs of repair low (as in Wikipedia)

The costs of failure and the cost of damage repair are two components of the costs of destruction. We’re going to have to extend these lessons radically, often counterintuitively,  in order to reduce the costs of destruction while sustaining, even enhancing, the creation of value.

Food for thought.

I don’t particularly like e-mail, not because it is bad per se, but because we have made it into a one-size-fits-all collaboration and communication tool. I have particular dislikes for the misuse of the cc button and the very existence of the bcc button, something I have written about before.

Even those dislikes pale into insignificance when compared to my public enemy number one, the infinite-loop mail. This is where person A sends an e-mail, say, to eight people named B to I. B drops A and C from the conversation and adds J and K. C meantime adds J as well, but drops B and brings A back.

This seems to happen regularly in large institutions, and we create all kinds of horizontal bureaucracies as a result, looping endlessly.

Kishore Balakrishnan, commenting on an earlier post of mine, mused about implementing ticketing systems for e-mail in environments where everyone could see the size of the queue, open items, turnaround times, the lot. Others have tried paying for attention at the same time as dealing with spam, using techniques like Seriosity suggests.

Some of these issues came up in conversation today, and it reminded me of some principles I tripped over many decades ago.

The first was in a world before I had corporate e-mail, I’m talking about 1981. [Others may have had access to such things, but my first memory of using serious corporate e-mail was in 1986 at Data General as part of their Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO) offering. While I had played with personal e-mail, I did not have a computer at home, so it mattered not.

So, in this world before e-mail, someone old and wise decided they’d teach me a bit about office politics and how to survive them. Things like: Don’t appear in announcements, they’re just like drawing large Xs on your back and saying “Kill me”. Try not to have an office, it confuses the daylights out of the plotters and schemers. Smoke (it was OK in those days).

When it came to interoffice memos (the pieces of paper you sent around in those bright orange envelopes with 20 address boxes and, occasionally, a string you had to tie round a circular tab thingie) the advice I was given was as follows:

1. Memos are always to be drafted by the recipient. She is the person who knows best what to put in the memo.

2. The recipient also chooses the sender of the memo. Again, she is best placed to decide.

3. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the chosen sender to sign the said memo. This is usually done by offering to trade. In exchange for the signature, you offer to get him a memo (drafted by him, of course) and signed by the person he chooses.

Sound overly cynical? It’s not meant to be. Just observations about enterprise life.

Today, when I recalled this, some other thoughts came into my mind. A separate conversation, this time about EDI and Edifact and SITPRO, discussing the evolution of automation of trade documents. Again in 1981, another wise person said to me, as if we were in a murder mystery tale, “who stands to gain? Who benefits from the standardisation and automation? Find the beneficiary and you will have someone motivated to implement the application. For it to work, EDI must be beneficiary-led.”

Who benefits? Who stands to gain? These are questions we have to ask ourselves as designers. But actually we know the answer. It should always be “the customer”. So now we have to keep asking ourselves “How does the customer benefit from what I am doing?”.

As we get better at answering that question, we will build systems that are genuinely designed from the customer perspective.