Category: Four pillars

I first came across this some four or five years ago, when researching the web for Rube Goldberg machines. But all I saw were references to the original Honda “Cog” advertisement. More recently, since maybe 2005, there have been a number of versions on the web. This one seems the most “official”, I only came across it recently while continuing with investigations into the Rube Goldberg space.

Worth seeing if you haven’t already done so.

Why am I looking into Rube Goldberg machines? Simple. Because one day I want to build a large “marble run meets Rube Goldberg meets Heath Robinson meets perpetuum mobile“. Told you it was simple.

Why then do I bother to talk about this in a blog “about information”? Because I think there are many lessons we can learn by digging into the making of the video. Lessons like what? Like maybe there is a “the physics are different” lesson to be learnt about software development meeting virtual world. Like maybe now that a critical part of Hollywood, post-production, is encamped firmly in Bollywood, the economics change as well.

Just musing. Comments welcome.

Over the last two years, I’ve been continuing with my research into open multisided platforms, particularly with a view to building community with them.

I’ve been privileged over the years to be associated with openadaptor, tiddlywiki and web21c; from the earliest moment I’ve tried to learn how to get out of the way and stay out of the way, while somehow remaining accountable. Sometimes I think we need a new term to describe the sort of soft-hands leadership required; the last time I tried, the best I could do was “tangential management”. But that’s another story.

I continue to think about open multisided platforms, and I’m sure there’s a lot I will learn in the process, particularly as friends and colleagues point me at people to talk to, books to read, articles to ponder over, sites to visit. And this has been happening.

For many years, it was hard to talk about open multisided platforms. Open source people don’t go looking for monetisation models, they solve problems. They make shoes, not money. So it was with open platforms. Whenever you mentioned them in conversation, the first question was not about the community but about the business model. And when you mentioned meta-models built around the community, in fact often built by the community, there was wailing and gnashing and glazings over. Which sort of killed the conversation.

Things have become a lot easier. Firstly, people are more willing and able to understand the importance of community, and of second-order business models built around the emergent community. But secondly and more importantly, articles like Better Than Free have helped remove the scales from their eyes (thank you Kevin Kelly).

Nowadays, when people talk about platforms, it is hard to avoid mentioning what’s been happening with Microsoft and Yahoo and Google. And it always reminds me of these three pictures I saw in an article by Henry Blodget. Read the whole article, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t agree with some of it.

They tell quite a story, don’t they? It’s going to be interesting, moving from the lock-in world to the open multisided world, a journey we have only just begun to take. A high-stakes table, as the charts above show.

… 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.