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Archives For December 2008

The Creator Economy

December 31, 2008 — 5 Comments

I am listening to Paul Saffo talk on the KQED program Forum. He is talking about what we might see coming up in the next few years. He discusses what he calls the ‘Creator Economy’ based around the simultaneous creation and consumption of value. He thinks of this as the evolution of what was once the producer economy, where scarcity was the controlling factor, and then became the consumer economy, where sales and marketing was the dominant idea. I have been wondering about this idea recently and see it as a natural extension of Robert Wright’s Non-Zero thesis. As our communication networks grow so does our ability to create new kinds of value.

The early examples are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Threadless. These all rely on their ability to generate participation and through that create individual and group value. I wonder what it takes for more of our physical products and services to follow this same path?

Saffo talks about everything from new religions, the various dialects of capitalism, the future of robots and the winners and losers from global warming. It is worth checking out. Here is the link.

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Five questions

December 19, 2008 — 7 Comments

I popped into BusinessWeek a few days ago so that they could interview me for their “Five Questions” series. I spent most of my time talking about design thinking.

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a prototyping experiment

December 19, 2008 — 6 Comments

A team of designers at IDEO have been working on ideas around Design On Time. Larry Cheng created a ‘free time’ dispenser that hands out free time in ten minute increments in the form of printed tickets. What you do with that time is entirely up to you. Nice idea, but Ted Howes and Adam Vollmer decided to try it out in the real world and took the dispenser on their Caltrain ride back to San Francisco the other day. Their story of the experiment in live prototyping is posted below. For me, getting prototypes into the real world is crucial. That is when we learn all the things about our ideas that we never even thought to consider. It does take some guts though.

Here is what Adam wrote:

Evening commuters on NB Caltrain 369 were happily surprised to be presented with free Free Time Thursday evening.  Ted and I took Larry Cheng’s 10 minute machine to the road, distributing approximately 600 minutes of free time in 10 minute increments over the 38 minute journey (that’s a 15.8:1 Free Time to Real Time multiplier!).

Reactions to our offering were mixed, ranging from excitement to confusion (in many cases), curiosity, suspicion, and in at least one case, borderline hostility.  Among the many ways that Caltrainers plan to use their free time, favorites included ‘more time with my son’, ‘more time with my cat’, and ‘more time with a bottle of wine’.  Encouragingly, the notion of sharing and re-gifting seemed to catch on, and we expect Free Time to be a popular white elephant gift this holiday season.  Several people observed that they spent up to 10% of their free time spinning the worm gear on the Free Time dispenser, but no one seemed to mind.

Ted observed an interesting viral characteristic of Free Time, that once a few passengers in a car had taken their Free Time, their neighbors couldn’t resist the opportunity to play.  In some cars people nearly lined up for tickets – in others, we got turned down cold.  In more than one instance, passengers who had previously declined changed their minds after enough of their neighbors had warmed up to Free Time.

Here’s the experiment in action:

Skepticism greets the time machine

This guy was PSYCHED for his free time

Ted delivers his sales pitch.  Really, it’s free!

Celebrating train riders bartered with us for Free Time with tasty cookies

This fellow already has PLENTY of free time.

This guy got it right away – he gave his friend a Free Time ticket right there on the spot!

Curious anticipation…

Free Time puts some people to sleep

Ted, triumphant

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CCA Design research class – Concerning Energy

December 10, 2008 — 2 Comments

If you live in the Bay Area then consider going along to the CCA (California College of Arts) MA design research class final presentation tomorrow night. Taught by Brenda Laurel and Kristian Simsarian, the focus this semester has been on energy. The invitation is here and directions to CCA are here.

In design thinking, global warming , ,
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Visualizing global warming

December 10, 2008 — 4 Comments

A Geneva based organization called New Economic Orientation for the 21st Century (NOE21) has created a quite compelling visualization of global warming. I like it both because of the Sims like design approach but also because it doesn’t stop at visualizing the high level problem. It allows you to dig into the details and find out more about potential solutions and gives clear advantages and disadvantages of various technologies and applications. I believe it is these kinds of tools that will spark the creativity of technologists and designers to come up with better solutions. It seems like a really good step on the way to the massive increase in innovation we need.

I am interested to see whether anyone has come across any other useful visualizations or other tools that might act as design inspiration for tackling global warming or other major social issues.

What characteristics does a tool need to have to inspire new ideas around a complex large scale issue?

This was a topic we touched on at the recent World Economic Summit in Dubai. The role of design to visualize problems and challenges so that they can be acted upon – storytelling as an input rather than an output.

I believe we have tended to disassociate storytelling from design and I think it would be useful to make the connection more explicit. That is what NOE21 is doing by connecting issues to solutions. I believe we can help many more people make the leap from taking a passive approach to a seemingly intractable problem to active participation in creating solutions (or at least participating in the solutions that are already available such as energy conservation) if we use stories to make the connection.

In global warming , ,
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