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The other day I started writing a snotty piece about the difficulties of networked or, as it is sometimes called, ubiquitous computing. Then I hit a question I couldn’t answer.

Continue reading An unanswered question

I’ve admired Issey Miyake for many years. I’ve even fancied, but never been able to afford, some of his clothes. But most of all I have marvelled at the beauty and inventiveness of much of his work. What impresses me is the way that he keeps moving forward. I was intrigued when he moved away from high fashion and started “Pleats Please”, clothes you can roll up into a tube. Now I see in Wired, that he is moving A-POC, A Piece of Cloth, clothes you can cut out and customise yourself, into areas like furniture and, perhaps even into buildings.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a very short piece about Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant article, “Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety”. I was interested to see that Gerd Gigerenzer, who I have written about before, has also tackled the subject of illusions of safety.
In a recent piece of research ” Gigerenzer analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Transportation to find out how many fatal crashes on American streets in the three months after the attacks were due to the increased traffic. His surprising findings: 350 people lost their lives on highways because they avoided the risk of flying – more than the 266 passengers killed on all four flights of 9/11.”
What I think we can infer from Gladwell’s article and Gigerenzer’s research is not so much that people are irrational, but more that we are often mistaken. The people who buy SUVs or who abandoned the comparatively safe airlines for the dangerous roads have good reasons for their decisions. It’s just that they are ill-informed decisions, as are many of our decisions. And they are ill informed because we are ignorant.
I remember some years ago talking to someone from the WHO. His concern was that malaria was still a big killer. What worried him was that there was a lot of solid knowledge about how to prevent and how treat malaria, but that this knowledge was not widely disseminated and hence was not put into practice.
Back in February, I quoted from Brecht’s “Life of Galileo:
“Truth is the child of time, not authority. Our ignorance is infinite, lets whittle away just one cubic millimetre. Why should we want to be so clever when at long last we have a chance of being a little less stupid.”
It seems to me the task of becoming less stupid is one of the most pressing of our time. We have the tools do it. The question seems to be, do we have the will?

I could say that HyperCard changed my life. Like many of my generation HyperCard was the vehicle that got me into what I still like to call hypermedia. So I was a bit sad, but not surprised to see that Apple had finally withdrawn all support for their unloved baby.
One of the reasons why HyperCard was unloved by Apple was the difficulty in finding a neat, simple description of what it was. As Tim Oren says in his “A Eulogy for HyperCard” – “What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question.”
It was, of course, all those things and more. Perhaps the best description was Bill Atkinson’s, its creator, who wanted to create a programming tool “for the rest of us.”

Continue reading Programming for the rest of us

My friend Ben Copsey, who hosts this site and put it together for me, has just won two REALbasic Design Awards. He won the Best Overall award and the Most Innovative Software award for Shared Space -“a tool for visual thinking, group working and content management. It allows users to create visual maps of information using web-like structures.” If you’ve got a Mac, go and have a look. It may change the way you work.

For years I have found myself shouting at the TV when Bill Gates or someone else from Microsoft has talked about legislators or judges interfering with their “freedom to innovate”. At the heart of my shouting has always been the question, “what innovation?”
The formidable John Naughton answers that question in an article in the Observer like this:
“…monopolists don’t innovate. Microsoft is no exception. The reason its claims to be on the leading edge are accepted by politicians such as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair is that they know so little about technology. In fact, a close examination of Microsoft’s corporate history reveals the extent to which this innovation propaganda is, well, hooey.”
He then goes on to list Microsoft’s “innovations” and where they came from.
Microsoft is a formidable business machine and has used it’s ownership of computer standards and the cash that generates with enormous skill to maintain it’s dominant position at the desktop, but an innovator it is not.
Bill Gates might want to reflect on the fate of Technicolor, which actually was an innovative company, but like Microsoft abused it’s monopoly.
At one time, if you wanted to make a movie in colour you had to go Technicolor and put up with it’s arrogant demands. When Kodak produced Eastman Color, which gave other Film Labs an opportunity to compete on more or less equal terms, Technicolor saw it’s monopoly position crumble away.
Could Linux be Microsoft’s Eastman Color?

Some months ago I was writing about the death of my friend Rosie Dalziel and said:
“…while my sympathies and loyalties are with the innovators, recognising the frustrations and loneliness they often have to endure, the barriers to genuine innovations may be a necessary and desirable thing. We need a measure of stability to be able to lead meaningful lives. If innovation was easier we would find ourselves overwhelmed by change. So it may be that the barriers and obstacles face by people trying to do new things are the filters that enable us to absorb the amount of deep change we can cope with at any one time.”
A theme that was echoed in Michael McDonough‘s “Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School”:
“8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
The world is not set up to facilitate the best any more than it is set up to facilitate the worst. It doesn?t depend on brilliance or innovation because if it did, the system would be unpredictable. It requires averages and predictables. So, good deeds and brilliant ideas go against the grain of the social contract almost by definition. They will be challenged and will require enormous effort to succeed. Most fail. Expect to work hard, expect to fail a few times, and expect to be rejected. Our work is like martial arts or military strategy: Never underestimate your opponent. If you believe in excellence, your opponent will pretty much be everything.”
Readers might like to compare McDonough’s list with Bruce Mau’‘s “An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth”

William McDonough is my kind of designer. Any designer who answers the question, “Where do you most like being? ” by replying, “I like being on my back with my child on my stomach – in the woods, in the city, wherever. So long as we’re both laughing.” is likely to get my vote. All the more so when earlier in the interview he says:
“We need to have fun to be effective. Eco-efficiency, where you try to reduce everything to zero, is not much fun. And nature itself is not that efficient. It’s effective. Take a cherry tree in the spring. It’s not efficient – how many blossoms does it need to regenerate? But it is effective: it makes cherries. We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency, but for its effectiveness – and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there’s no problem. We can celebrate abundance where it is ecologically intelligent.”
I have come across William McDonough before, but up until now I didn’t take him seriously. Now after reading this interview in the New Scientist I think I may have to think again.

Many centuries ago when I first began playing with Mosaic, one of the web sites I went to a lot was Justin’s links. What I liked about his site was that it was like a window to all sorts of interesting stuff I wouldn’t have noticed or come across otherwise. When I started writing here one of the things I wanted to do was to have it rich in links to people and ideas I found interesting on the grounds that any readers I might have would find them interesting too. So I was really pleased to find the other day that Justin was still going and still linking. The net and the web is such a transient space I love it when I find some continuity.

Robert Sapolsky has an extremely interesting interview in Edge where he covers a lot of fascinating stuff. The whole interview is well worth a careful read, but the bits that really caught my interest and that I’ve quoted at length, begins:
“For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man?if I were 25 and asked that question I would certainly say competitive prowess is important?balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What’s clear to me now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff. Go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough that’s not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap. I could not have said that when I was 25.”

Continue reading Another kind of downshifting