Innovation in work settings

So a whole lot of companies recently have been talking and thinking about work settings to cultivate good work and innovation. (I think I posted about this before but I can not find it so oh well) The thing that is interesting is that what many of these companies are doing, i.e. google, is creating more flexible environments and more ad-hoc relationships so that people cross-pollinate a lot. There are various other objectives as well, including user convenience and the ability to enter and stay in a state of flow. In any case, when I was recently looking at this kind of innovation I thought a few things. One main one being that it would be a good project to actually go and do some research in how people work well because I totally think the "nice" offices of the world are doing little more than scrambling it together. A lot more recently I was thinking about it again and I thought what a good office from my perspective would be.

For me a good office is a clean desktop on a nice little and adaptable laptop. I do not use paper (though I think it would make my work better if I did more often) and I do not use a mouse (people who actually know how to use trackpads know they are faster than mice) and I tend not to use a table even when it is available. I am happy with my laptop in my lap. Additionally I need my office with me all the time, because I work everywhere and all over the world, and I need my office to be able to fit in and interact with anyone else's office. In addition to a laptop my office includes a few things like cameras, a global socket power board, so I can plug in a lot of anythings, and a global plug adapter, so I can plug my power board in anywhere. I also tend to have at least one mobile phone and about 20 SIM cards for various different countries. For networking I carry a Airport Express because even in a hotel room wireless is really convenient, especially when working with a few other people and creating ad hoc networks. I also carry a large hard drive but ideally I would have a smaller one of similar capacity, 500 Gb or 1 Tb. Headphones are also really important, though at this point I should invest in an ace bluetooth earpiece, the B&O one seems nice or perhaps the new Jawbone. For the time being I am not sure what the ideal office would be like in terms of a cubicle. I mean, I presume I should have a briefcase however so far I like a simple bag that I can take anywhere. Perhaps I would also take a pen but I think that is it.

So, if a ad-hoc work space can be this ad-hoc, can it also be more motivating of innovation and flow producing?

I think that a few steps could be taken. Firstly, better flow creating software needs to exist and more users need to be in a position to take advantage of the more advanced flow related features of tools they use (Designers fault not users fault). For the cultivation of innovation I think it comes down to some other issues. One key one, and something that really gets in my way some times, is a way to take notes and make them easy to find and readable. Evernote is ok in theory but a bit much effort for my needs some times. Another thing is being able to interoperate as much as possible and being able to operate as effectively as possible outside ones' own office. The obvious thing here is to use web-tools but sadly I have found that sometimes the web sucks in some places, and some websites do not work everywhere. So this is an issue that I have yet to find a good enough solution for. I think the only thing that computers and computer systems still do rather poorly is integrate functions, especially communication with other tools. i.e. modelling and talking to someone on the other side of the world about my model at the same time is really lame, even with the various tools that people have been working on.

So at some point I am going to try to find a better way to ensure this kind of mobile office is really mobile but also good and innovative and flowing and then I am going to try to link it back to the way real offices work to see if they can be made better...which I am pretty sure they can. More on that later.

Ok. So that was almost ranty I think, and I think I did not really come up with a good closing solution yet. Does anyone have any suggestions. I would really benefit from them :-)

Another project that I have been playing with a little bit is trying to work out what people actually need to travel with. Every time I travel I find I have something I do not need. So I want to put together a document that helps people work out what they need and which products are good solutions for those needs. If anyone is interested I would love some help because I suck at packing light.

Future and Magic

Today I thought about how a big part of the things have made now the future are the things that do what would have been considered magic and are now provided by technology and science. At the same time, I think the other side of the future is undoing all the bad innovation that has lead to the strange world state we are in now. 

For those who have not seen it please watch Future Perfect's TED Talk


Today I had I took a train too and from Daejeon, about 2 hours south of Seoul where I had an interview with KAIST for a PhD. I am not sure if it is the right place for me. 

Korea is still a lot of fun however this evening I realised I had no water. I will have to find a way to get some tomorrow. 

Seating in public places and transport

Does anyone think that seating in public environments could be designed better. I was thinking that perhaps there are a few issues with some of the common trends in this area. I have been travelling a lot recently, waiting in public spaces like airports and stations and using a lot of busses and trains and so on. The thing I have been noticing is that people often do not sit optimally for the best health of the crowd, that is to say, people often sit to to isolate them selves using a certain method, i.e. not sitting next to people if possible. There are of course other factors that are seen in some of the mentioned areas, like the availability of power, the fact that groups often move together, and the fact that some of the noted environments involve distinct changes in use statistics. 

Sooo. I thought about a few of these things and though a way to make busses or train a little nicer would be to make less wall oriented seating and more floating seating that would still let people walk around and would let people either be close to or less close to people around them depending on their acquaintance with each other and without taking up too much extra space. 

Also, I thought a little bit about steps to socially engineer people sitting in airport gates and other such places to make sure they would use the available chairs optimally, or at least in the sense that clusters and isolated individuals could exit without wasting seats or making either group less happy. 

I will try to put some sketchup models together to show what I am thinking about. Any other ideas?

Fixing Computers, Playing Games, Singing Songs

First, it looks like I have a place in Korea. But I am still interested in ideas in this regard. 

Next, I repaired my computer on my kitchen table here in Paris with a bunch of really inadiquate tools. It is really nice to have my main machine back up and running. 

My computer when open

Last, travel is good. I have met a few interesting people recently. Some in Sligo at IT Sligo where there is some possibility I will do some further study. They were rather nice and so on and Sligo seems like an interesting though remote and small place. Additionally I met an interesting girl on the Chunnle coming back from London to Paris. She was an RMIT Architecture student who is now doing lots of other stuff including a few greats, Zaha Hadid and Tom Barker. As most people will know I think architecture is really silly but after talking to this girl for a wile, someone who likes Zaha's work none the less, I realized a few things:

1. Architects can be nice though there is no question that they are silly.
2. Without knowing what you do it is hard to do it. I think I specialise in trying to do things that are not identifiable and spending time making it impossible to really understand what I do. Though this has some value I think I really need to make a decision and try to work at something specific, even if it is still abstract in its specificity.
3. Usually the truth ends up being good. I think designers and normal people should realise this more and use it in a few ways. Nice innovation is good design, true and honest design that works because it has been done well. Not changes that are made to take advantage of a relationship with end users that offers subtle advantages, truth is a lot nicer.

OK I need to stop being silly and get ready to do something interesting today.

The hotel in Sligo which happens to be an old mental institute. Bat shaped architecture at its best.

Paris and a few big problems

So I am in Paris.  It is pretty nice. Travel images are here. More will go on now and then but my main computer is broken now so I am not doing that so much.

I was thinking recently about the worlds problems and a conversation triggered the idea of thinking about what one would do if they were in control of the world. So I know that is a bit vague, but what would you do first if you had world power? Put answers in the comments!

I think I would put in motion systems to normalize the global economy and try to rebuild culture in culturally sparse reigns. I think I would also be interested in reducing the influence of politics in an attempt to reduce the political battels at all elvels of society that plague our systems with corruption and a lack of flexibility. 

Just one more thing. I am going to Korea in about 2 weeks and I really need a place to stay. Does anyone know some place  I could crash for free or cheap from 1st to 11th of July in Seoul. Please please tell me if you know some place.

Also, I should just say, I am not doing a lot of reading while traveling so sorry for not reblogging as much. 

Budgeting

So I have been using mint for a few months now and more recently I have been spending a fair bit of time planning and budgeting my upcoming trip. During this process I have experimented with a hole bunch of information models and approaches to money. Not really thinking about breakdowns and contingencies but just trying to work out really effective ways to visualise the data at hand and also ways to work with it. Part of this has included considering sources of data and how the data will be used at different times during this process. 

A scenario of what I am thinking about is as follows. 

A person planning a trip around the world must consider a number of things; travel costs, passports and visas, projected income, projected living costs in each location, and accommodation. They can map these things out pretty easily before they start actually making reservations and so forth so they can just get a rough idea about weather or not it will work with the money they have. This is not hard, essentially writing documenting dates of events, like the start of a trip and so on, and costs of things that can be estimated or referenced online. As a side note, I really think travel sites should give an estimated cost per day living, at perhaps 3 different tiers of luxury. That would help so much. 

After getting an estimate cost model and realising whether or not the trip is even remotely viable they need to start actually buying tickets and so on. At this point I think the common visualisation methods, such as daily balance spreadsheets, begin to fail because they do not let the user really represent the information the do and do not know in a realistic manner. I may be very sure that I need to leave a specific country by a certain date, or meet a friend somewhere at some time but for the most part I think there are just too many variables to construct a good model in this way. This really is quite a wicked problem, too much potential to change. 

I guess what I am really getting at is that there is a gap between having an idea of what should happen and making it happen in naive budgeting methods because they do not seem to accommodate indecision well.

I also think as one lives the process of spending money the budgeting model should be a tool that can continue to provide feedback and help with contingency processes. 

So the end product I think should exist is some kind of thing where costs have various statuses of certainty, as do most other details, like dates. This should also be applied to income as so many people work on hourly wages. This would basically let the user forecast a cost or profit and as time comes close establish greater detail, then as the expenditure occurs it can be represented within the system in absolute detail. I think beyond that the role of such a product is just to provide a hole lot of really useful ways of looking at the data at hand. I really think people miss a lot of info about their money information because they do not look at the data properly. This is something a good money product should help with.

Oh gosh what a scrambled set of thoughts. Luckily I can blame my concussion for this post. 

In other news, I obviously lived through the night re. yesterday's post on my Concussion. 

In other other stuff, why on earth do more spell checkers not use Google's spell checking technology. Apple's sucks so much in comparison to Google's. 

Planning to Travel Around the World and Using the Google Visualisation API

So I am going to France this summer then I thought it would be nice to go overland to Korea and then to China before coming home. Here I have started to plan my movements but I have not yet checked spelling. I have also used the google data API to render this in an interactive timeline. I think it is still linked to the online data I am editing so it may change without notice.

It was not hard to use but it did take a little while to get it to work. I wish I could pipe in other data sets or something. Perhaps I can... I will see what I can do. 

Update: The timeline has stopped working for anyone now so I am going to not bother fixing it until I know some more details about my trip. The API is good but seems to be crufty and have some serious reliability issues at the moment.

Mysterious Places

The other day when driving back from BarCamp Orlando I saw an interesting thing in one of the medians on the highway. It is a strange tower like thing just south of Ocala on 441. In any case, when I got home I tried to find out what it was by looking at google maps then google earth with social data on, and so far I have found nothing. So... I decided to go visit it. I have not gone yet but I hope to at some point in the next few weeks. Then I realised it would be neat to have a map where anyone can add similar things. When I say anyone I really mean anyone I care about hearing from but I think that really could be just about anyone (email me if you want to add things and I will invite you to the map)

So here is the map with the first place marked. For some reason I can not really get it to give me the zoom setting I wanted so you are going to have to click on the push pin and zoom into it.

If anyone knows any cool places (in any country) please comment we can try to make a collection.



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