Category: Four pillars

Gapingvoid tweeted this earlier this morning.

Coming from Hugh, that’s saying something. Even if he has “retired” to Alpine.

So I went and took a look at the story: The Techcrunch Web Tablet project. Which seems to look like this:

Now neither Michael Arrington nor Hugh Macleod needs any link love from me. So why am I writing this?

Because I think it’s the right way to go. We have to keep experimenting with affordable low-power simple-spec sensible-form-factor open portable computing devices, we have to find the ten thousand ways that do not work in order to find the one that does.

A project like this, when centred around a participative architecture and community, reduces the cost of failure, reduces the cost of the ten thousand ways that do not work.

Ubiquitous and affordable and usable connectivity is an imperative for everyone, even more so for the five-sixths of the world that have none of it as yet. On the basis of “a dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid” principle, we should not underestimate the value of providing such power to people, power that will translate itself into affordable food, clothing and shelter, power that will translate itself into health, education and welfare.

Human beings are incredibly creative, incredibly adaptive and are cram-full of potential. Initiatives like this may well help release that potential.

In order to release that potential, we have to change how we think. We have to think of these tablets as mobile phones with the right form factor and functionality, not as computers with the right price and operating systems. For some strange reason, most people are comfortable with the idea that someone in darkest Africa or rural India or China needs a phone; yet the same people look puzzled when you suggest they could do with compute power and connectivity. Whatever. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck….

The headline, by the way, is taken from one of the four hundred odd comments that have been made on the post so far. The commenter was “a bit sceptical” about the chances of TCIT “actually pulling this off” and listed a series of issues, like “no opensource hardware project has really taken off” and “crowdsourcing doesn’t work that well”. And then he ended with “You’re a blog”.

With a little bit of luck and a following wind, we will see a decent open multisided platform approach here, as a result of which we will see what we have failed to see so far: a global opensource project, hardware and software, with local extensions and frills made by a dispersed long-tail community around a common and reusable core. Language and script support based on people everywhere rather than profitable conurbations; applications that have the ability to make that little difference to people’s lives; no sign of lock-in anywhere.

Let’s find that one way that works.

If you’re eclectic in your reading of print media, it may have occurred to you that there are some people around, people who are quick to dismiss the blogosphere as an echo-chamber, full of shallow and superficial like-minded people who couldn’t write an accurate and in-depth story about anything to save their lives.

If that’s the kind of perception you have about the blogosphere, then go take a look at this site. Here’s an extract from today’s post:

“So these talks they’ve been having up until now, they were basically all just talking about the rules of the talks they might have if they ever get to actually talking about the talks we want them to be talking about?”

“Something like that”, I replied vaguely, deliberately avoiding a forensic description of exactly what was going on because I wasn’t sure I could provide one.

“So tell me”, my friend wickedly said, “When are they going to start talking about what everyone else is talking about, and that is the fact that there is no food in the shops anymore?”

The people who write blogs like the one above are the real A-listers. I found out about it via Thomas; he’s going up the Alps to do something about it. So give, and give generously, here.

Bass: A male singer who sings in the lowest vocal range.

Bass: A name shared by many species of popular gamefish.

Bass: The name of a Cornell professor of neurobiology and behaviour, studying how vocal communication evolved with ancient species by researching ….. a low-humming fish…..

Fearful symmetry? Whole story here.

For years, I’ve been told that people in IT are obsessed with “the technology” without really understanding “the business”. This has been good for some people, with the creation of a hybrid role [“Don’t worry, Superman is here; I’m a normal person who speaks geekish as well, and I will save the world for you”].

Over the years, over many organisations, I’ve seen many skirmishes between “finance” and “HR” and “operations” and “IT”. As the years passed, and as skirmishes became battles, they became boringly familiar. I’d seen the movie before, and even slept through it. Each battle went through four steps:

• My profession is more important than yours.
• In fact it is so much more important that you won’t even understand what I do.
• But I understand what you do, and it is simple. I don’t understand the fuss.
• So I will spend my time pointing out that difference to my management whenever I can.

Until I read Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions I was blissfully unaware of all this, of the implications of the blurring that’s taking place, of the reasons why this was happening. But enough of that, it’s the subject of a different post. But.

Where I work, we’ve done something very different. As an industry, we’ve been selling “convergence” to the market for a long time without actually being converged ourselves. So we’ve fixed that. One year ago, we merged our product, process, network and IT departments into two new ones, calling ourselves Design and Operate. [As far as I am aware, no telco worldwide has taken such a radical step.]

All my life I’ve been fascinated by design, but as an amateur. My training was as an economist, so the passion for design was driven by natural curiosity, a willingness to observe and the commitment of an amateur. Whenever I looked at things, I liked making observations, largely to myself, about the design of the things I was looking at or using.

Here are some examples:

Walking around Bologna recently, I loved seeing the porticos that dominate the architecture of the town. Bologna has more than 32 kilometres of porticos, aesthetically pleasing, eminently practicable, a pleasure to observe and to use.

Shelter from rain or sun should you need it. A place where shops and stalls and restaurants can encroach upon within reason, to change and enhance the customer experience. A trademark for the town, standardising it yet allowing for considerable variety and ingenuity.

Here’s a second example, again from the architecture of the town.

It’s taken at the Piazza Maggiore, the heart of the town, an open where the sun seems to shine its strongest. Yet the sense of cool that pervades this little passage above has to be exeprienced to be believed, and you can see the light and shade effects for yourself. Once again aesthetically pleasing yet immensely practical.

Just round the corner from the Piazza Maggiore, I came across this, in one of the porticos I was referring to:

Bookcases holding secondhand books, placed in the portico in front of the bookshop. Beautiful curves in the aged wood cases, easy to lock and secure, yet lovely to look at and with a great visibility-to-blockage ratio.

Given the examples above, you may surmise that the only aesthetics-meets-practicality examples I see are all in the past. Not true. Here’s something from the hotel I was staying at:

For many years, when it came to hotel room directions and numbers, I’d seen Braille support, as in the example below:

Which was fine if you were standing right in front of the room, for people with strong sight; for blind people, it was fine once you got there in the first place. The use of the carpet to signal room direction seemed a good thing to me, good for people with normal sight and for partially sighted people as well. I also liked the fact that I could look down a corridor and see approximately where my room was, giving me a sense of depth I didn’t have before.

Incidentally, while researching this post, I came across thisisbroken.com, a site well worth visiting. They have examples like this one:

There’s a lot that still intrigues me and confuses me about design. One of the themes that I’ve been kicking around of late is the concept of “horizontalness” and “verticalness” in design, what that means for the customer, why vertical patents are not good for customer experience.

What am I talking about? Let’s take the car industry as an example. One manufacturer patents side-impact airbags. A second patents “control-your-CD-player-radio-on-a-stick”. A third comes up with integrated rear child seats. And so on.

The patents are for “horizontal” products, yet implemented in vertically-controlled platforms called manufacturers. We need to reduce the cost of transferring such innovation between vertically integrated platforms, while at the same time ensuring that the creator of the patent gets rewarded for the creativity and original investment.

Something to think about. Comments welcome as usual.