The first stage of my move is complete. After a comfortable road trip, a few cute little towns, and a couple national parks I’ve landed back in my new old home. Here is the view from my living room window. Not too bad. Even on a grey rainy morning its awefully dramatic. I’m pretty anxious to settle in a get productive again. However my stuff is still en route, with an undertermined arrival date. Oh well. I’m glad I brought some extra clean socks.
Well this is the day before my big move from San Diego back home to Vancouver. I’ve been a little swamped with packing up the house, and trying to finish up a number of projects here. I do seem to move a lot–5 cities in as many years. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to kick back and relax when I get to Van.
… later that day …
So the house is pretty much all packed up. Most of the stuff is already on the truck, and the last big things will go on in the morning. Its quiet and echo-y in here. The shrill laptop key-clicks remind me just how empty this space is, and I find myself rummaging through memories of past moves. Curiously they have all taken place at about the same time of year–perhaps I’m just following some sort of reptilian annual migration.
All of my prior moves felt like the beginning of some kind of adventure. They all had a crisp scariness to them. This one feels more like an end. It feels like an end to the firey wanderlust I’ve had since about 17 when I decided I wanted to move to the other side of the world. I wasn’t really running away–I was running to–to what I still don’t know, but that probably isn’t the point.
I think this one will be the last, and its a little sad because there are so many places I never a got a chance to live in: anywhere in England or Japan, Paris or Helsinki, Budapest or Sao Paulo. Sure I can always visit, but I’m a terrible tourist. I need to live, pay rent, shop, eat, do laundry, slowly get soaked up by the daily rhythms of local life. I once spent a month in Rome doing nothing but mundane living among the ruins, and it was one of the best trips I’ve ever had.
Perhaps I’m on the edge of what is just a different kind of adventure; but something feels a bit less adventurous about it. Don’t get me wrong, there are few places in this world I’d rather live in than Vancouver. I feel an intense personal affection for that city such that living anywhere else again would feel adulterous. I guess I’m just a bit sad to watch the embers cool.
Ce ci n’est pas in image
Later this week I’ll be off to the Overlap unconference.
I don’t go to conference as much as I used, because over the years I don’t think I have ever gotten anything of value out of a signle one.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go to Montreal last year for the UPA conference. I absolutely love Montreal. If the winters were just a little less harsh I’d move there in a heartbeat. If you’re ever there, find Swartz’s deli and have one of the greatest most evilest sandwiches around. The conference however was a complete waste of time. And I almost went to IA summit in Vancouver, but I’m glad I didn’t because the word from friends who atteneded was that just some sound and some fury.
However Overlap is something entirely different. Overlap isn’t so much a conference (or even an un-conference) as it is a conversation, and great things come from great conversations. Furthermore this event is free, meaning participlation is based on passion, not profit.
I don’t normally write posts that are just links to other stuff–but there two are so damned great I just have to.
The first is a UN sponsored interactive info-graphic called Human Development Trends 2005. It is a stunning piece of work from both a economic and information design perspective. It is one of the few examples of interactive information I’ve experienced that truly maximizes the value of showing information over time. When I first found this I must have spent nearly 2 hours just exploring the charts.
The second has nothing to do with design, business, innovation, or economics. But it might just be the most amazing adventure story ever–and its all happening right now. 8 years ago a guy decided that he was going to literally walk around the world. Today he’s nearly half way there, having started in the Falklands, and traced a path of unbroken steps all the way up South American, across Central America, through the US and Canada, and has recently just crossed the Bering Straight. All this and a tragic love story to boot.
I’ve been following him since 2002. Back in 2003 I was only a couple hundred miles away from him, and I could kick myself for not taking a couple hours to drive up to meet this absolutely amazing individual.
I was running errands today and saw a company minivan emblazoned with branding. The company ‘s name is PETS. Thier tag line is “PETS for pets.” PETS stands for Personal Enrichment Training and Services. I don’t know what they do, but i think it has something to do with obscenely rich people’s pampered shitzus.
But what does PETS mean? As a whole, it means absolutely nothing. But look at each element individually and we get a different story. “Personal,” well that means it for me, its something I can build a relationship with, its something that makes me feel listened to and cared about, so this is a good warm fuzzy start. “Enrichment,” well who doesn’t want to be enriched? If being rich is good, then getting EN-riched means getter richer, and getting richer is better. And food that’s enriched is always better for you, so this sounds good too. “Training,” well I want to be a better me and training is the way to do, and hey, I’ll bet these people with the branded minivan are just the folks to train me. “Services,” mean they are here to serve me, I will be thier king and they my minions, I will be a strict by benevolent king and they will make me feel as big as I truly deserve to feel. And I love my pets, so this is all good–sign me up damn it!!
I still have no clue what they actually do. But it doesn’t matter. Meanings are irrelevant. This is a kind of marketese beat poetry, where the whole is entirely meaningless. What matters are the rythmic flows and elocution of each particular vague connotation that blends into a single vapourous, seductive sense impression.
This gibberish is by design much much less than the sum of its parts–it is a counter-gestalt
Okay, so this list could be practically endless. Here are just a few that popped into my head recently.
In his post G. Claude Rapaille and his dartboard Grant McCracken says “Claude Rapaille is a man without shame.” Well judging by his Austin Powers taste in frilly cravats that seems a fair statement. McCracken then goes on to say “The idea that there is a code! This is ludicrous.” This I believe is not.
If Rapaille’s claim is that he can turn people in to open books by simply cracking thier singular code, then I sure would agree this is ludicrous. But lets step away from Rapaille’s clownish dramaticisms, so that if we interpret “code” to mean not formula, but metaphor and myth… well that changes things. Both metaphor and myth are psychologically and sociologically central to how we make sense of the world and our places in it.
Linguist George Lakoff, for example, helps us understand conservative thought in the US by explaining its central myths and metaphors like “the strict father.” Such titles are really just handles for what are actually dense and complex mythologies.
Myth and metaphor are usually implicit and encoded in the tone and language of discourse within a given community. As an outsider understanding these myths and metaphors helps reveal what’s being said between the lines and what goes without saying. It opens up the community’s discourse for a fuller and better contextualized interpretation. In some cases this understanding can even help one make sense of what was gibberish. So in conservative parlance “family values” isn’t just a vapid catch phrase, it has a real and significant meaning that is more easily accessed by an outsider who understands the “strict father” myth.
So myth and metaphor (codes) aren’t some sort of magic universal translator, they are more like a Rosetta stone, a tool to help comprehend what is otherwise inaccessible. Myth and metaphor help decode a little of the mystery that is other people, and help us see a bit of the world through their eyes.
My last post got me thinking about the question of getting to market first versus getting to market right. The oft parroted common wisdom is that to succeed you need to get your thing to market first. I generally skeptical of anything oft parroted. Sure the early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. Here are a few examples:
I suppose I am just a little biased. As a designer I seek to optimize the user’s experience with a product and the value they get from it. But in a true first-to-market context the value is in the raw capabilities the new product’s functionality exposes (i’ll post on the related basis of competition issue shortly). So, first-to-market scenarios are primarily marketing plays, while best-to-market scenarios are iNPD (engineering, marketing and design) plays.
But if you really are first to market, that means your latent market has lived well enough without your product all these years. So would a few more days or weeks spent on design really be too much to ask?
One argument might be that “we have to ship 1.0 to start realizing revenue, then we’ll let the designers do their thing.” Of course downstream redesignings are, generally speaking, drastically more costly than upstream design.
Another argument might be “we need to move now and capture market share before our competitors do.” Forget the myopia of letting your competitors define your product strategies, but if your competitors are in fact that hot on your heels then now is the time to start redesigning your product, not after you and your competitor both deploy roughly the same product at roughly the same time for roughly the same customers. Competition then becomes a big stalemated game of rock, paper, scissors.
Check out Ari Paparo’s post about how his experiences at Blink show how it is more important to get it right than to get there first.
This week’s Monday Morning Must Read catalyzed a lot of stuff I had been reading and thinking related to innovation and China. I’m going to make a little prediction (the good thing about dramatic prognostication is that if you’re right you get you say I told you so, but if you’re wrong no one will remember). China will never innovate.
China has positioned itself as a fast-follower rather than a trail-blazer—partnering with GM and hiring retired Japanese business leaders, assimilating their industry knowledge and then going it alone. As a fast-follower China will continue leaving the risk of innovation to others, and then execute those innovations cheaper and faster than the innovators can. As a strategy this makes enormous sense, and seems to be working rather well.
Porter tells us that you cannot adopt two positions simultaneously. So, since China has already committed to the fast-follower position, they will by choice not innovate.
Companies make this choice all the time. Indeed, many are quite successful at either buying their innovation through M&As, for example. So why can’t a whole, politically monolithic, country do the same?
Le Corbusier called the house a machine for living. Apparently Frank Gehry believes a building to be a machine for proclaiming his self-indulgent ego and stylistic histrionics. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one with a deep bowel-felt revulsion for nearly every pointlessly melodramatic curved surface Gehry starchetects? Gah!
Just follow these simple steps and you too can become a solipsistic starchitect in no time flat. You might even attract a few groupies. Of course you won’t actually need them due to your masterfully cultivated intellectual onanism. But thier bottomless adulation adds a little juice to your only real product: ego.