The optimism of adaptation

you're already doing something — whether it's a job, a hobby, or an occasional recreational pastime — that exploits your strengths, allows for your weaknesses, gives you pleasure, and uses your uniqueness.

via blogs.hbr.org

This is a short quote from an optimistic article at HBR about how if you try to use your values effectively you can probably, over time, create a rather lucrative niche for your self. I agree in general, despite numerous obvious exceptions.

In any case, I agree with the greater point of finding a true value in what is had, as opposed to trying to create a new kind of value. I think, by extension, this also applies in many other forms of value and even in design. In some strange way, the best design could be to use what you have in a reasonable fashion to perform the activities you need to.

What do you think?

Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

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.

User Centred Dogma vs. Design that is Good

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So this is a really lovely talk by some guy. I completely recommend everyone in the world watches it. It is about an hour and fifteen minutes long but I think it is worth it.

Just in case you were wondering, it is about how user centred design is not as effectual as it is claimed to be and is often used to justify useless endeavours. The speaker (who is actually Jared Spool) claims that simple good design with a strong interaction with people actually using the outcomes is a better model.

I agree. But hey I love doing dissemination maps so I am not going to drop trying to work out how people think yet. Also, I think his model is a good proposition but I think it could be made better by tailoring methods for this kind of work; "Release Early, Release Often" as Google often says.

Search to Activity

This is the idea that instead of URLS one could just type something like Mark, and a bunch of potions would pop up. These options would include things like, contact methods (email, im, phone), sites, feeds, projects etc.. I think this is most interesting because right now there are a lot of good solutions that seem to stay independent. For instance, if I type something into Google I will find a lot of things. If I type something into Address Book I may find some things, come things I want but perhaps some of the things I want will not yet be back in Address book. Similarly, if I wanted to email someone rather fast I would essentially first have to create a new email. If I wanted to instead of emailing them look at their LinkedIn page I would have to either know their LinkedIn URL or first search or go to my contacts list in LinkedIn. 

My argument is that all this data, like the URLs of a bunch of my friends LinkedIn pages, and their email addresses and their websites and their blogs are all stored in places that are accessible already (many are stored simply in the browsers URL auto complete. So, there should be a thing that checks who a page or account is about and then associates them with it. So if i start typing there name in or a service in I get either a semantically useful list of their sites or a list of people I know using that service respectively. Just to give a completely obvious example, when I type Will (someone I studied with) in the right place I should see an option to instantly email him, I should see his online presence, and I should see some contact or info like any data that is on his openID. 

I know that things like Quicksilver and Launchy do this a little but in terms of process optimisation they are still off the mark. They are also not integrated into many systems that people do not really realise they use, especially online services. 

This sort of tool could greatly increase the effectiveness of things like GTD by providing a really 1 to 1 connection with the information that is known by a user and the tasks they want to perform. 

The web is the world and seemingly a large part of the future of computer platforms. If we want this to be the case we should make good tools to interact with it. All the current browsers and most of the browser extensions that exist today do not take good consideration of this fact. I think this feature is one of many that could be used to improve the human interface with the web and the world. 

More on why I think browsers suck later.