Bret Victor has a nice piece on the future of interactive design. He exhorts us to dream big and not just extrapolate. Amen.

He then points to a direction for future dreaming, pushing designers to encompass everything hands can do.  This is a good starting point, but begs for further elaboration.

Like him, I love hands. I’d like to jump on board and give him a hand to push designers further.

Hands are not the central constraint in today’s interfaces (nor the future interfaces he describes).

The central constraint is peeking up at us at 9 seconds into the video he references.  It’s our eyes.

Interface is about navigation and way-finding.  Current device interfaces rely on sight for us to find our way through the digital maze. Good design clarifies the path and helps us recognize patterns that can point us to further capabilities. Hands help us move visual information – the pictures under glass Bret discusses.

Future interfaces will be driven by new methods of “display.”

For us to use our hands to navigate, to interface with capabilities (in the way we tie our shoes, for example) the information has to be “displayed/embedded/be one with” the objects we’re using as way-points and manipulating (in this case the lace has weight, dimensionality, material characteristics).

As a side note, this may be coming faster than we think, with information gaining ubiquity and intertwingling into the physical word.

We live in a period of continual disruption and competitive innovation. All too often, the processes we use to survive and win in this world, the tools employed to assess and develop the next generation product or service, are not well suited to the demands of the times.

Categorization, card sorts, trained responses and procedures are the world of defined systems.  Search, intuition, adaptation and theft (on a micro and wide scale) are central characteristics of the world of improvisation and innovation.

Progress and advancement, in fact survivability, in a world of continual disruption and a high volume of aggressive competition depends on getting “search” right.

To gain an advantage in the near term, we need to predict what the search results will be.  In the longer term, we need to predict what search itself will be.  Both of these, in an environment where perhaps the only defining constant is the user’s intent.

Recently, it seems there has been an overflow of devices and software with good, well designed interfaces.  These have put powerful capabilities in the hands of many people, unlocking creativity. But there is an interface beyond design and chaos beyond channeled creativity. Design is an organizing principle. It is a construct for accessing capabilities.  It provides an interface and a context.  Way beyond good, intuitive design there is the ugly. We are in the early stages of the ugly.

Intuitiveness is a function of how well an interface conforms to a person’s expectations. Great interfaces can be a step beyond the expectations, making design nearly invisible. A person’s expectations are often a function of the environment in which they operate or into which they have been acculturated. Interfaces have gone through various stages reflecting the environments which have surrounded people.  Earlier interfaces (user controls, manuals, processes and procedures) reflected a person being in a production line. They played a part in a larger, linear process.

After, interfaces reflected the hierarchy of functional organizations, adding dimensionality to the interface and the capacity to do more across multiple functions.  The sharpest designed interfaces of today are refinements of this approach, paring down the functions and assuming the dimensionality required for any particular person.  Where we are now, are task-based approaches mashed-up across multiple service capabilities. Interface definition is “me” centric rather than being oriented around tasks defined by the organization or functionality.  In some sense, this is a special case of personalizing the tasks.  But a powerful case. The tasks are user defined. The person is at the center of the definition and accesses the capability directly. The capabilities available are beyond the boundaries of the pre-definition of an organizational structure or design principle.

A testament to the power of the design is the extent to which the capabilities are in demand (see article on why we buy tools), which has allowed the creation of supply chains that make those capabilities affordable, available and easy to replenish.

“Me” centric design has opened a new frontier.  Where the frontier is once again open, constructs will be challenged.  There will be interfaces that are ugly, ineffective, un-intuitive and just plain hard.  There will be power unleashed in a chaotic fashion, without a “beautiful” or even discernable organizing principle. They will be so because the capabilities created will be beyond existing contexts.  The capabilities will define and create a new environment.

Then from there, the cycle will start with an organizing principle evolving to exploit those capabilities most effectively. Effectiveness will be defined, as in all human endeavors, in the marketplace and battlefield (in fact we are seeing it already with app developers, low-cost tablets and IEDs – capabilities beyond existing organizing principles).   Barriers will grow to those capabilities as their range and dimensionality are explored and organized into interfaces (processes, procedures, etc.).  Then again, good design will make them commodities and re-open them to creativity and innovation.

We are in the early stages of the ugly.

Good tools tend to sell well. They inspire creators, enable tinkerers and fill Sunday’s with the promise of accomplishment.

One of the reason’s tools sell well is that they are a unique category of goods. Tools can have currency-like characteristics. Their value is in the eye of the beholder.  Every goal is different. Everybody uses a tool differently.

Tools are boundary objects between the present and future. They represent a promise. Tools open us to the realm of improvement. With the right tool, we can achieve our goals.

If you want to create something people will buy, think about creating a tool. If you want to gain sponsorship for a new project, think about a project that will result in an expanded capability for the sponsoring organization. Every person or organization has a dream. Create a tool that will help them realize it.

The more flexible a tool, the easier to use and therefore the more easily we can see ourselves using it to achieve our goals, the better the tool will sell.

In a tip of the hat to Steve Jobs, a consummate tool maker, dream big and help others dream big. By building the right tools, tools that help others build tools,  we create a cycle of societal enablement for innovation and attaining big dreams.

Lady Gaga has over 10 million twitter followers.

That number makes other brands salivate - and jealous.

They want those kind of numbers. They’d be happy with a fraction of those numbers.

Those numbers, though, are in-line with her total reach, her level of exposure and the way people interact with media.

Human Behavior is a Constant

As mentioned in my presentation on social media, people’s behavior seems to be a constant regardless of the technology used.  80% of all a person’s phone calls are to the same people.  80% of all Skype calls are to the same people.  The medium changed, the technology changed, but human behavior does not.

Lady Gaga’s numbers are no different. They are generally consistent with the levels of engagement across other media e.g. the percentage of an audience that calls into a talk radio show or writes letters to an editor of a newspaper.

Anecdotally, this number tends to be 1-2% of a total audience.  For Lady Gaga, using a total audience of at least 500 million unique members (in mid-2010 total views of her three most viewed videos was over 1 billion), her 10 million plus followers is right in line.

Why This is Good to Know

It paints clear expectations for any social media effort. To get to 10 million followers, an established brand needs to reach 50 to 100 times more people than that.

No doubt, social media makes it easier to reach people and easier for people to engage with your brand. But it is not a panacea for growing your market. That, still requires having something special that people want.

Why Does this Matter for Project Management

1.Technology doesn’t change human behavior. Project management software or other tools facilitate and expand our actions, but they don’t change the fundamentals of how we act.

2. Projects are all about people. It remains critically important to understand people (see Theory of Constraints) to manage and design the right processes for your projects.

Seth Godin and Ian Greenleigh propose promoting hashtags with books to facilitate persistent conversations about the books or topics.

This is similar to the experiment I participated in with StackExchange and Rally Dev last week at the RallyOn11 conference.  (The idea was to keep the conference conversations going and searchable long-after the conference ended.)

StackExchange is the perfect medium to make this happen. Twitter is dangerously unmoderated for this to work there.

What we’re talking about is knowledge discovery and knowledge creation. The act of people finding knowledge, discussing it and creating new ideas.

Knowledge needs to function in a context to have meaning. This context can be provided by a community -by an audience.  This is facilitated by creating ways to categorize knowledge or discussions.

By giving anyone the ability to publish to a hashtag, the knowledge loses context. It becomes highly diluted. Quickly.  (Unless, Twitter comes out with a business model where there’s an entrance fee/ a gate to publish to a specific hashtag or to search on a specific hashtag.)

StackExchange has a community that puts knowledge discovery and knowledge creation into a meaningful context.  It creates a taxonomy of knowledge and structure to the process of knowledge creation and discovery that is meaningful to the community (and highly findable).  And since the privilege of determining that structure is based on participation in the community, it is theoretically open to all. (Shades of Wikipedia but with fewer barriers to entry into the editors club.)

What’s more, by providing structure and clear rules of participation, StackExchange has a built in revenue model waiting to burst: offering knowledge-process management services to organizations that value it. Like pharmaceutical companies, healthcare, telecom or aerospace, places where innovation carries huge multiples.

Longer term, unstructured conversations will become just more noise and meaningful conversations, conversations in context, will gain value. This is the challenge for Twitter, turning audience into power.  This is where StackExchange currently has the lead.

UPDATE: Let me know if you have any questions on using StackExchange for your organization, particularly the project management or programmers site.

My article

“How to Use Social Media to Build Valuable Business Relationships”

was published today in eWeek.

This is not related to project management.

I read an article from the law firm, Miller Canfield, that suggests practices judges, courts and attorneys can take to restrict jurors from getting information about their trial from the internet.

You see, a jury is supposed to make its decision based solely on the evidence presented in court.  In the age of internet enabled cell phones, access to the internet at home or a library, and even TV news-stories and documentaries about ongoing cases, jurors can easily get information from other places.

It seems to me that trying to control access to this information is a not a viable long-term strategy to preserving the accurate execution of justice.

Long-term, the way justice is determined needs to change. Ubiquitous access to information is only going to increase. It can’t be controlled by trying to limit it. The Justice System needs to find ways to adapt to the new landscape.

I can imagine that this is as seismic a shift in justice as was the introduction of public in education in a society or mass literacy. Both of these changes paved the foundation for our current system of trial by jury.

Thomas Friedman has an inspiring article in the NY Times on a virtual start-up.  Virtual companies are nothing new in the world of software and services.  What’s new here, though, is that this company is a virtual manufacturing company.

“‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup,’” writes Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine (as cited by Friedman). “Now it describes a hardware company, too” thanks to “the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution. … Global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony.”

In the world of the virtual manufacturing company, production capacity and manufacturing flow seamlessly to the cheapest source, much like programming services have in the world of software development. Producing a widget is no longer that special. It can be done in many places at a relatively low cost. Like the name of the essay in Wired Magazine says “Atoms are the New Bits.”

And this is the kind of thing that can actually save manufacturing-based economies like Detroit.

What?

You may ask how it could possibly be a good thing that other countries or regions can produce high quality goods at cheaper prices and that companies can by from them so easily. How is that good for Detroit?

In a word: Value.

You have to look at where the value is.  Where wealth is created, where the unique advantages is.  It isn’t any longer in producing run of the mill goods.  The value is in creating a really great product.

Virtual manufacturing means that a clever innovator with a good idea can experiment with a new product and produce that product for a lot less money than it used to take. Engineers and product managers can get a new ventures off the ground with much less capital and much faster than ever before. It means that the amount of risk involved in manufacturing is less than its ever been.

It means its easier than ever to create a valuable product. It is easier than ever to create a product that is truly remarkable.

All of that is great news for Detroit.

It used to be that only software and service businesses were cheap and easy to get off the ground.  From the 1970’s on the remarkable breakthroughs were in software or innovative financial products.  That helped create the success stories of Silicon Valley, Seattle and Wall Street.

The cost of getting a manufactured product off the ground was high. It made it risky to invest in or to quit the day job, as it were, to give it a try.

But now, that has all changed.  And that plays into the strength of the people in Detroit.

As the article states, this can be a huge engine for growth in the United States.

Invented and financed in the West, further developed and tested in the East and rolled out in both markets.

Inventing and managing the lifecycle of a manufactured product is right up Detroit’s alley.  And not just Silicon Alley. I’m talking about the straight, old-fashioned grease covered alley of Detroit’s past. The alley filled with mechanics, backyard tinkerers and engineers.

If mechanics, engineers and tinkerers can dream it up, it can now become a reality. And if there’s one thing we have lot of in Detroit -its mechanics, engineers and tinkerers.

It is up to them, and to each one of us, to help make it a reality.

I want to highlight a few of the things Vertabase has been doing for Haiti. This is not to toot our own horn but to point out a few extremely meaningful programs and ways to help.

1. We participated in sponsoring medical supplies that went with doctors from Holy Cross Hospital in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The surgeon that helped raise the money has an incredible, first-hand account of his time there. You can also contribute on the site.

2. The One Laptop Per Child program has started planning for the educational needs of the children of Haiti by launching this great collection of XO laptops for Haiti that were given out as part of the Give a Laptop Get a Laptop program over the last few years. As eary participants in this program we are sending them our XO’s.

One other neat program that is the geeks for Haiti t-shirt. You can promote your support and help your choice of charities like UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders at the same time.