TibetanTailor

Notes on “In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm” by David Segal NYT Dec 16, 2010

“. . . its specialty is conceiving new businesses and what it sells is really the art of innovation.”

“America has gone meta – it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking.”

“… without the right atmospheric mix, no brainstorming session will produce the cognitive version of lightning”

“… traditional brainstorming can devolve into a kind of competitive idea tennis.”

“ … improve theater . . ‘Yes, and?’ … what was once a contest is transformed into a group exercise in storytelling. It has turned into a collaboration.”

“ … strategy isn’t about stability, it’s about change.”

“For years, the good manager was one who had data at their fingertips … By the early ‘90s, though, companies like Microsoft and SAP were selling software that digitized this task … Suddenly it’s about leadership, creativity, vision.”

Reference

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

“The Mesh” is mostly about physical (owned) objects that get shared. Social objects are objects that act as social “glue” between people.

I see the start of really powerful experiences when these two things are brought together. In Lisa Gansky’s book she gives that example of the Zip Car named “Mini Mucho” which is a example of a mesh object that is also a social object.

Social Object transformed into Mesh

Look at how social objects can be transformed into mesh objects (through time-sharing, such as a pet dog that gets rotated around a couple different families). What are all the ways we can time-split an object or place usage, such as a bank that during evening hours could be used for community gatherings? Or the use of corporate offices during the weekend for unconferences and barcamps.

Mesh Objects given an opportunity to build social meaning

How can mesh objects be given the opportunity to become social objects (through functions such as naming, tagging, graffiti, etc)? What are the ways we can use QR codes to give a “guest book” like quality to objects that get past around. For the tool library example – how about a list of all the projects that that tool helped to build (birdhouses, tree houses, book shelves, etc.)

References

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing by Lisa Gansky (Thank you Mr Simborg for turning me on to this read.)

Social Mania: Designing Social Interfaces

The Missing Piece of the Semantic Web – The Social Browser

Marc Rettig visually explains his “process” as understand and try with prototypes between them.

Bodystorming can thus be explained by extension as focusing on the “prototypes” or bodystorms as the central element of understanding and trying.

See Also

Prototyping at the Systems Level

Monday night I went to New Tech Meetup of Central PA and saw a presentation by Charles Palmer of Harrisburg University on a week long “social media blackout” experiment they recently did.

Interesting Points:

• Only about 15% of the students abstained which I thought was a low number.
• Some students did get the “Facebook twitch” and “cheated” by walking down the street to siphon off hotel wireless.
• Students talked about wanting to “know what’s going on outside the building.”
• Students stayed in the hallways talking to one another, which I guess they don’t need to do if they are on their social media sites (but it seems that these FTF connections are not the ones they are seeking in the earlier comment about knowing what’s going on outside the building.)

What I find interesting from the above comments and observations is seeing how space/place use is connected to  social media use.  This calls to mind some earlier work on Placemaking Presentation done at Miami IA Summit 2008 that was during the start of the social media explosion.

Does social media technology change how architects construct the spaces we live and work in? Do we need less hallways spaces? Do we need less windows?

My notes from 33: understanding change & the change in understanding by Richard Saul Wurman

4 Sentence Summary

Articulate what you really need – describe the performance needed from a person or product to solve the problem. Learn more by understanding more through asking “how something performs.” Build a model with the intent of making constructive demands for an improved better-working environment. Designing your life is the big design problem.

Five Star Ideas

(p15)
By organizing information, he said proudly, you create new information.  Nothing has changed; you’re still the same people. And that’s the same with everything else in life.

(p15)
If you don’t ask, you don’t get . . . all of it pointed in one direction: Learning.

(p17)
You don’t remember something you haven’t learned and if you’re not interested, you don’t remember; therefore, you don’t learn . . . as courses did not come from a wellspring of interests of those being taught.”

(p17)
“Now, as I said, everybody’s got a pretty good idea of what the problems are, and they’re certainly not shy about telling you.  But the difficultly seems to be that nobody really knows how to say what the real problems are. It’s as though there are only two words in everyone’s  vocabulary:  the word “No” and the word “More.”

(p20)
Innovation, creativity and invention are about what! How I do something is design.

(p20)
We have the problems and we have the questions, but the only questions we seem ever to ask are the ones that can be answered “more” or the ones that can be answered “no.” So, if you look at it that way, you could say that first of all, we don’t know what our problems really are. We don’t know how to articulate what we really need.  We don’t know how to describe the performance we need from a person or a product to solve the problem. We don’t know, in other words, how to make the constructive demands for an improved, better-working environment.

(p22)
We live in fear of our ignorance being discovered and spend our lives trying to put one over on the world.  If we instead could delight in our ignorance, use it as an inspiration to learn instead of an embarrassment to conceal, there would be no information anxiety!

(p29-30)
…they could begin to concentrate instead on communication drawings which conveyed real information about how physical spaces would perform and feel.

(p31)
…once people began to realize that if they were going to do anything about the world they lived in, they were going to have to learn about it.

(p32)
“I am never content until I have constructed a model of the subject I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand; otherwise I do not.” – William Thompson

(p34)
“Most things don’t work and if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” –RSW

(p37)
I love technology . . . I choose my assistants well and I know creative thoughts come from me and not my tools.

(p39)
Design wasn’t a problem or a challenge; it was a way of life … the big design problem is not designing a house … it’s designing your life.

(p40)
Do good work … the ultimate is to do good work and that’s all we try to do.

(p41)
Ask someone to talk for an hour, they’ll do it right away. Ask someone to talk for five minutes, it will take them months to prepare.

(p43)
Hailing failing will get you where you need to be! Hailing, failing yet still sailing was, in fact his motto.

(p46)
So much useful and productive activity, so many good ideas, so many conceptual breakthroughs, had come about as the result of the strange embrace between the so-called creative person and his experience with and reactions to failure.

(p50)
The disease of looking good is confusing aesthetics with performance . . . the cure: ask how something performs!

(p51)
Administrativitis: This disease . . .  where the individuals think they are running the system but in actuality just he opposite is the case . . .  is characterized by a preoccupation with the details of the operation – administrative issues, salaries, square footage, supplies – and a neglect of the purposes for operation.

See Also

Goal Setting and Richard Saul Wurman

If you need to show someone interacting with someone else on a “display” just take a large piece of paper and rip a big hole in it. Here is a good example of a “televiewer” that one student is getting help with homework from another student.