iPad specific answers to the creation challenge are appearing. This video for iMockups places a nice face on these answers.

I feel rather silly that it didn’t occur to me earlier in the game that wireframing would be low hanging fruit for graphical applications on iPad. Fortunately Omni Group and others have. As OmniGraffle is a central tool to my work I’m especially interested to see it develop. Things seem to be progressing well. From iPad or Bust! to a Two weeks later follow up things seem to be progressing well. Hoping to see a working app close to next month’s iPad release.

Imagining how such tools could be used in quick sessions with clients and developers, let’s say I’m warming to the iPad.

There have been varied reactions to the iPad but those that most interest me are those that go beyond Apple’s marketing message of “the iPad is a new thing that will revolutionize computing” and ask “where will this revolution lead?”

An angle I find especially interesting is expressed in Alex Payne’s On the iPad.

What I find most interesting is how he speaks to the side effects that Apple’s choice to keep the iPad closed may have for future engineers. The closed system may result in the loss of that magic moment when a future engineer sees behind the curtain.

To set up the binary: iPad is for users, personal computers are for inventors.

That magic moment where you see how the machine works and the code invites you.

• Invent a better way to do something
• Invent entirely new things that haven’t been done before

These invitations are the reason that many of us became engineers. The concern is that without that moment we’ll lose some of the innovators of the future.

I remember that moment and the effect it had on me, so I’m partial to the concern. But I don’t see that concern playing out in my children’s lives nor am I entirely convinced it will in yours.

In most households, the iPad won’t be the only device. For the short term, where there’s an iPad there’s a personal computer. Where there’s a personal computer, there’s an opportunity for that magic moment. The future will show whether our digital lifestyle future will keep to the closed system or whether forces for openness will prevail.

Another valuable angle is: the binary is a false one.

• Not all invention comes from engineers
• Not everybody needs to get into how the machine works

My Dad would love to have an iPad. He likes computers but the iPad epitomizes the “just show me what I want” approach that he’s hungered for in a computer for a long time. He doesn’t care about command lines or when abstractions leak. He wants his applications to just work. Email, social networks, office documents. Having a device that lets him do that with minimal thinking about installation or configuration would make him very happy and he wouldn’t feel that he’d missed out on anything.

I have a hard time criticizing that as an experience designer. There’s a device coming that’s what he wanted. My internal dialog about “it looks like a giant iPod Touch,” “you don’t actually create anything on this yet,” “there’s no chance to see the man behind the curtain,” these things don’t matter to many people. They just want the thing to work and work as transparently as possible.

The closed system will provide that for many people.

iPad in various respects isn’t what I’d hoped for. I wanted something more open. At this point in time, the closed system is a feature. It lies on those of us who prefer the open system to provide an answer. How will we provide an open system that offers simple installation of applications that get out of users’ way as much as possible.

Pre-release expectations

Talking with friends about the iPad back when we were all still speculating on the name we came across rumors that dashed our early hopes. The tablet would most likely use iPhone OS and the App store as its sole path for software. A closed system.

From there my thinking went to how Apple would differentiate itself from humdrum tablet pc offerings already out there. iPad isn’t entering an empty category, it’s defining a category that’s been poorly executed and marketed up to now. (Remember Macintosh? Same kind of thing.)

How to do it? You focus on what iPhone OS and App store do best:

• Consume media and data
  • Music
  • Video
  • Social media
  • Web
• Small tasks of creation
  • Email
  • Social media

iPad does this and from what the marketing tells me, does it incredibly well. (Gotta love the gap between announcement and real world launch.) Reading about the product left me a bit flat. My impression seeing video of the email app I think they’ve done some very cool things in customizing the built-in apps to a tablet and leverage options that aren’t available in the smaller iPhone form factor.

Digital lifestyle device

A few years back a key piece of Apple’s marketing message was that the Mac and the iPod were products for your digital lifestyle. The Mac served as the hub for this through the iLife applications. Photo albums, home movies, and garage band recording “for the rest of us.”

iPad is by nature a digital lifestyle device. It’s not for coding. It’s not for heavy duty design or video work. It’s for stuff that I would do on my couch while watching TV. It’s for showing stuff off to my friends when we’re talking in the living room.

Given iPad’s digital lifestyle leaning I’m surprised we didn’t see adaptations of all the iLife apps at launch. I can’t help but think that Apple project teams are currently working on iPad specific versions of iMovie and Garage Band. These are use cases tailor made for something less than a laptop but more than an iPhone. (Add camera and mic to the iPad and iMovie just got even better.)

Until Apple or approved third party apps fill this space iPad will miss a key audience. The current iPad will draw people with cool factor, but as many have noted, it’s a device that’s all about consumption. Many of us want to create on our devices and share those creations off-device (and Microsoft, HP, that’s exactly where you strike back against the iPad).

The most touch-native path to letting people create on the iPad is visual. Leverage the visual and audio-focused digital lifestyle applications that have already proven themselves then expand from there. Let me sync my creations to a computer or hard drive on my wireless network without having to use MobileMe and I’ll lay down the coin right now.

Anderson brings up important points on balancing environmental protection and global costs of living. Are parts of our environmental protection effort creating unnecessary scarcity? Are countries’ economic protections driving prices up artificially?

I’d add some questions of my own. Are we pushing for or supporting government policies that are holding back the development of technologies that will free us from scarcity of energy or food? Are we selecting technologies without fully viewing their secondary effects (such as ethanol leading to scarcer food corn and driving up global food prices)? Are we allowing our preconceived notions about technologies rob us of their economic (or other) benefits?

I don’t agree with all of Anderson’s suggestions, but I agree with what I believe is the central thesis. We need to consider more carefully the decisions we’re making about what technologies we favor and which we discourage. We have to consider the secondary effects of these decisions if we’re to act wisely and achieve sustainable prosperity.

He and his nonprofit Gapminder have done some cool things with visualization to bring out aspects of the data that get ignored, but as he notes, we haven’t got the holy grail yet. Looking through the Gapminder site, it looks like all the visualizations are hardwired to a specific dataset. This pairing of presentation to specific data provides punch to items like their Dollar Street 2003 Shockwave presentation, which includes home walkthrus comparing lifestyle across the world’s economic ranges. (Very cool.) But it leaves me on my own if I want to apply the kind of graphing methods he presents to a dataset that Gapminder isn’t taking on.

It seems to me the next natural step with more general visualization tools like those in Rosling’s TED presentation (even more than searchability) is to develop a visualization system that lets analysts and decision makers apply the same sort of visualizations over their own data, or better, over multiple datasets from multiple sources, providing the same plotting, subset exploding, curve overlays, and multi-axis visualization. Move from delivering the individual visualizations to providing the tools to create the visualizations.

Some very cool stuff they’ve done already though. Shows the power of visuals to convey a message.

Content + microformats = crazy delicious

It’s easy to find developers and markup standardistas lauding microformats as the next great thing, and as a currently-implementable stepping stone to the semantic web. That being the case, I’ll say that the possibilities microformats provide for easing data export, streamlining content updating, and easing data collection burdens for users are wonderful.

Deferring dreams

I only see one cloud trying to darken microformats’ day… browser support.

Despite how cheaply (in the 37signals sense) developers familiar with hCard can encode contact info, I’ve found it difficult to recommend to many customers that they make significant use microformats on their web sites due to the low payoff compared to the cost.

Microformats are wonderful (remember the crazy delicious comment?), but for a number of customers, this technology shoots wide of their target audiences. Personally, I get stoked when I see Tails’ microformat icon appear in my status bar. But the Tails icon is a great representation of the problem: I’m getting excited over a Firefox extension’s behavior, not a regular browser behavior.

I’m an outlier.

Most of the folks using my recent customers’ sites haven’t heard of microformats, and forget about Tails or any other Firefox extensions. Most of them know Firefox as “that browser that’s trying to take on IE.” The more tech savvy among them will have heard that Bill Gates said something about “we need microformats,” but won’t necessarily know what that means. (To be honest, since that’s all I’ve seen from Microsoft about microformats, I’m not entirely sure what it means myself. Can we look forward to microformat support in future versions if IE, are we doomed to another “embrace and extend,” or is it just talk?)

Despite my love for them, I don’t believe microformats will influence the experiences of “ordinary” users (many of our customers’ customers) until microformat detection and data export are built into IE and cleanly import into Outlook and similar applications. (I want to see the same functions built into Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and all their related browsers and all the various email clients, but until “alternative” browser use ceases to be alternative, it’s all about getting Microsoft to adopt.)

A less oft quoted part of Gates’ proclamation on microformats is that we need “to get people to agree on them.” My read: Until we have agreement on microformats, browser makers won’t be able to read them out of the box, so don’t expect us to deliver this innovation to the masses anytime soon.

hOpe

Fortunately, I think much of the work on standardizing microformats has been done. A number of microformats are established and well documented. Developers are using these documented formats on their sites, and enterprising companies are providing microformat based searching. Google’s Usage Rights feature and Yahoo’s Creative Commons search checks rel-license links for specific flavors of Creative Commons licenses, and Technorati provides a microformat search covering contacts, events, and reviews marked with the relevant (hCard, hCalendar, hReview) microformats.

But even with Google and Technorati showing what cool things are possible with microformats, we will have to drive adoption.

Delivering the dream

If the web’s awash in well formed, standards compliant microformat content, the browser makers won’t be able to ignore it, and they won’t be able to claim that the target’s moving too much to justify the development costs to support microformats.

What about the client problem, you ask?

We have a pretty good sense which clients won’t really gain anything from microformats. We have a similarly solid sense of which clients would benefit and would be interested in what microformats can do for them given the proper introduction.

We also know how to make microformat adoption as cheap as possible on our end. The lower the cost for entry, the easier it will be to sell clients on it or just include it as a value add.

And, just a guess, I’m thinking that most of us have one site or another that’s ours to command, maybe even a few family and friends’ sites that are ripe for a quick implementation.

Old time religionin’

And there’s always spreading the word with those we work and play around. Share the gospel of microformat goodness. As people see how microformats will help them kick ass, ((In wonderful Kathy Sierra “help your users kick ass” ways)) they’ll start looking for microformat support. Just ask Derek and Will, once you’ve got an audience on your side, you’re golden. The more people that see what the web could be, the more there will be pushing for it to happen.

As the excuses fall away and user demand mounts, it will be too expensive for browser makers not to support microformats. And we’ll have successfully taken over the world.

As a means of facilitating interdisciplinary thinking and to help enfranchize informal learners, Burke presented a knowledge map project he’s been working on called the Knowledge Web. Through this tool and others like it, Burke hopes we will foster a more relational approach to learning and learn to think more innovatively.

His KWeb knowledge map focused on a web of significant individuals in art and science history, connected by relationships including friendships, working relationships, enmity, etc. The idea is to take journeys through the network, see what interactions led to innovations and how those innovations rippled through the network of people and ideas.

To show this network of knowledge, KWeb uses a navigation metaphor of nested spheres, inner spheres representing periods farther back in time, outer spheres representing more recent events. Once you pick a node in a sphere, it shows that node’s direct connections to other nodes in the web, and secondarily highlights directly connected nodes’ directly connected nodes.

Burke’s intent with this approach to representing knowledge is to hook people with interesting connections and get them to trace through the network with the kind of thrill people experience when reading through a mystery story. He means to take advantage of curiosity about how ideas are connected to drive users’ learning activity.

Using KWeb to trace through a path, Burke illustrated the kinds of connections across discipline, business, market or culture that have led to important innovations in history.

Burke provides an example beginning with Richard Arkwright, a man who made weaving equipment. He had all the usual connections you’d expect to people in the textile industry. But look, he’s talking to this guy who has nothing to do with textiles, he fixes machines for Glasgow University. “This guy” turns out to be James Watt, who as Wikipedia tells us was “a Scottish inventor and engineer whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.”

During the demonstration Burke suggests that as we pay attention to similar information in the present, we can predict where, when, and what kind of innovations will happen. (Though the thought of tracking people’s associations part has a certain invasion of privacy feel to it.)

Social ecology

Burke puts forth an idea he calls social ecology describing society applying the predictive capabilities society develops for understanding the secondary or ripple effects of a given technology in sufficient detail and far enough ahead of that technology’s development to understand what we think about that technology as a society before it develops, and develop a consensus as to whether we want to encourage the development of that technology or not.

After describing this he quickly notes that he’s not proposing centralized government controls upon innovations or the entirely free reign of market forces. (Citing past repressions of communism and excesses of captialism.) He hopes for a solution that will educate and enfranchize people so they are capable of contributing meaningfully to decisions about innovation. The ultimate hope he puts forth is “that in balancing entrepreneurial dynamism with the public good, we can have our cake and eat it.”

In relation to Social ecology, Burke notes there will be resistance to change. As innovations continue, technologies will develop that people won’t like, and in many cases, it will be the “old fogies” that don’t like the changes, because they will require a change of mindset.

Mozart got kicked down the stairs. The Catholic church censured [and] burned people who said the earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Some people still don’t like the theory of evolution. We have a built in resistance above all to the extension of inclusion. It rocks the boat.

He finishes the presentation returning to the need to expand education to properly enfranchise people, pointing toward a future in which such enfranchised global citizens will be able to focus resources on the most helpful innovations for both commercial interest and the public good.

Our institutions

Burke also made reference to institutions frustrating innovation because they are based on the problems, solutions, and knowledge of the past, and are continually looking backward, hoping to continue to innovate based on what straight lines of discovery they can extend from that past knowledge. The problem with this otherwise reasonable approach being that “The future you might want to plan for is almost never a simple straight-line extension of the present,” and that such a focus on the historical and present achievements of an institution artificially discourages the collision of previously unassociated ideas that leads to innovation.

A further symptom he cites of this institutional problem lies in the western approach to higher education focusing at the graduate and postgraduate level on “learning more and more about less and less,” a case in point being a colleague whose work apexed in studying John Milton’s use of the comma. Burke traces this to “the man I blame for everything… Rene Descartes” and his reductionism as put forth in Rules for the Direction of the Mind_. (See especially rules V – VII.) To properly study complex things we must reduce them to simple propositions to which we devote our full attention.

As a result, we compartmentalize knowledge into an array of disciplines where everybody focuses on the details of their own discipline, leaving other areas of knowledge to the other disciplines to make sure that we’re attending properly to our own. Conventional wisdom says that until recently we rarely broke the invisible walls between disciplines to cross pollinate among them within higher education.

I see this as conventional wisdom in that I hear many people say this was true, but have never been presented documented proof of how long it’s gone on or that it has necessarily changed despite our best intentions. It has the reasonable sound of conventional wisdom, which is part of such wisdom’s treachery. I also find this concept hard to reconcile with the historical examples of technologies or ideas in one discipline rippling into innovations in another that Burke is so fond of highlighting.

Where innovation lives

Burke notes that the most likely places we will find ideas that will lead to innovation lie in today’s gaps between disciplines, markets, and social needs. He cites Norbert Wiener saying “Change comes most of all from that unvisited no-man’s-land that lies between the disciplines.” Or in his own words earlier in the presentation…

When differing types of data come together in new ways, 1 + 1 = 3. The rules of math change. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

When ideas collide that people haven’t brought together before, innovations develop that can (and often do) bring historical change through their primary or ripple effects. That being the basic thrust of Burke’s work on the Connections series, his lecture series, and his KnowledgeWeb project.

For those unfamiliar with his work, Burke was the mind and the voice behind the PBS series Connections, which focused on the connecting threads that led to some of the innovations that changed the world, however unlikely those connections may seem on the surface.

The BYU presentation appeared to cover topics from both his Staying Ahead and The Knowledge Web presentations. Seeking methods for predicting innovation and its secondary effects provided the primary focus of the presentation, and the Knowledge web provided a tool for making those predictions and fostering innovative, interdisciplinary thinking.

Predicting secondary effects

Burke presented the problem of predicting secondary effects by noting technologies whose secondary effects proved detrimental despite the high value we placed on their primary effects. Items like asbestos, thalidomide, chlorofluorocarbons, nuclear power, and carbon emitting machines were all invented and/or used with the intent of making our lives better. It was after adopting them that we discovered that asbestos fibers caused respitory illness and cancer, thalidomide caused birth defects and deformities, CFCs depleted stratospheric ozone, etc.

These secondary effects move beyond disciplinary barriers as well, as seen in one of the secondary effects of the invention of the stirrup in Afghanistan: the modern English language.

By adapting the medieval Afghani stirrup, the French enabled their horsemen to fight more effectively and defeat the Anglo-Saxon British in the battle of Hastings in 1066. French Norman rule over the British Isles brought changes to the language spoken in Britain, as the Anglo-Saxons sought to prove their refinement by learning the Anglo-Norman language of their French rulers. This contributed to the shift from Anglo-Saxon “Old English” to Middle English, which later developed further into the English we use today on either side of the pond.

Barriers to innovation

Our intellectual boxes

We would clearly have liked to avoid the unexpected problems associated with these and other technologies, or found the way to predict the problems before we encountered them. The problem is, these secondary effects aren’t often visible to us until we adopt a technology. We see things from within the “box” of our current understanding, and it requires effort to see outside of it.

Burke points out that this can even be true in our hindsight, citing a story told about Ludwig Wittgenstein in a conversation on Copernicus.

Somebody apparently went up to [Wittgenstein] and remarked what a bunch of morons we in Europe must have been (800 years ago before Copernicus told us how the solar system works) to have looked up there and thought that what we were seeing was the sun going around the earth, when as any idiot knows the earth goes round the sun, and you don’t have to be Einstein to understand that.

To which Wittgenstein is said to have replied… “But I wonder what it would have looked like if the sun had been going around the earth.” The point being of course that it would have looked exactly the same.

What he was saying is that in any decision about what to do next, you’re stuck with your view of things. If, as an astronomer, the contemporary paradigm says the universe is made of omlette, you make instruments looking for traces of intergalactic egg…

We’re all in a box.

And incidentally, you’re right. The box you’re inside and the box I’m inside may be very different. So I may have trouble buying into how you see things from your box, and you may have trouble buying how I see things from mine.

In the end, we have to get over ourselves and our boxes or we’ll paralyze our natural ability to connect ideas and innovate.