Reflecting on Effectual Entrepreneuring Pedagogy

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Skip Walter

I have the privilege of teaching a great group of Human Centered Design and Engineering graduate students at the University of Washington in the course “Designing a Human Centered Venture.”

Last week in our eighth class of the quarter I asked these design professionals to reflect on their effectual journey through the class to date.  What follows is my collection of notes from their diagrams and reflections on the journey.

I really enjoyed the thoughtfulness and insights of your reflections on the pilgrimage we’ve pursued this quarter in learning about the mindset of an entrepreneur and the designing of a human centered venture.  Your imagery and reflections reminded me of the start of the course when I shared David Whyte’s book of poetry Pilgrim:

“In his seventh volume of poetry, David Whyte looks at the great questions of human life through the eyes of the pilgrim: someone passing through relatively quickly, someone dependent on friendship, hospitality and help from friends and strangers alike, someone for whom the nature of the destination changes step by step as it approaches, and someone who is subject to the vagaries of wind and weather along the way.”

David Whyte's Camino

I was reminded of the connection between “Camino” and the effectual path when I encountered Ann Patchett’s What Now? in my favorite weekly blog “Brain Pickings.”

“Echoing Steve Jobs, who in his own fantastic commencement address famously cautioned that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,” Patchett urges these new graduates to be sure to return at some point – this, she argues, would let them reflect on the series of small choices which, as William James put it a century ago, “[spin] our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.” Patchett writes:

“Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours – long hallways and unforeseen stairwells – eventually puts you in the place you are now. Every choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn’t a bread crumb in sight – there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland creatures. You glance from left to right and find no indication of which way you’re supposed to go. And so you stand there, sniffing at the wind, looking for directional clues in the growth patterns of moss, and you think, What now?”

Other excerpts from What Now?:

“Nothing at all is very much out of fashion these days, as are stillness, silence, and studied consideration. Studied consideration is hard to come by with those little iPod buds stuffed in your ears and the cell phone competing with the Internet. Perhaps we avoid the quiet because we’re afraid that the answer to What now? will turn out to be I don’t know.

“It took me a long time of pulling racks of scorching hot glasses out of the dishwasher, the clouds of steam smoothing everything around me into a perfect field of gray, to understand that writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.

“There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now? represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life. It’s up to you to choose a life that will keep expanding. It takes discipline to remain curious; it takes work to be open to the world—but oh my friends, what noble and glorious work it is.”

Your diagrams and the presentations were very helpful to me as a way to get a sense of the learning that is occurring.

The following are the images from each group and my recollections of what you presented.

The Task

The Task

The Sharing of the Journey, the Learnings and the Hassles

 Designing a Venture Class

Inbound Marketing Team Diagram

inbound marketing team

Reflections from the team:

At the bottom left of the diagram you can see how we saw ourselves at the beginning of the quarter.  The world of entrepreneurs was relatively small and we were far apart from it.  As a group, none of us had any relationship with the world of entrepreneuring.  As we moved through the quarter, the world of entrpreneurs became a larger space and we now see ourselves as being a part of that space as well.

The key learnings that we got from the quarter are:

The hassles that we had this quarter were:

  • Ambiguity
  • Inter team communication
  • Experimenting
  • What is our vision?

We were really surprised by the vision hassle.  We thought we would do it once and be done.  However, we had to keep coming back to what is our vision and revising it throughout the quarter.

By the way, do you think our tolerance for ambiguity has changed this quarter?

Skip:  I don’t know yet, but that is one of the research questions I have is whether it is possible to change the Tolerance for Ambiguity.  We will retake the survey at the end of the quarter.

Software Team Diagram

software team

Reflections from the team:

What is in green is what we’ve learned this quarter.  What is in red is the kinds of hassles we struggled with this quarter.  In the middle is the essence of what we’ve learned this quarter.  The Build and Learn loop in the middle illustrates this cycle of having to build in order to learn something and in that build/learn process it is not always clear what is chaos and what is order.

We really liked the Chaos and Order loop that David Robinson introduced us to and how easy it is to focus on the order and lose sight of how we need to keep coming back to the Chaos.

At some level, the green and red text boxes on the left and right sides of the diagram represent the duality between chaos and order.  So for example the “pressure to build the best thing possible” is balanced with the chaos of accepting that a “good enough” prototype early as a minimum viable product will help us learn more from the customers.

Carrying through the chaos/order loop is our representing those things in the middle as shapes that are partly ordered and partly chaotic.

The Crowd Sourcing Team Diagram

crowd sourcing team

Reflections from the team:

When we started the quarter, we thought that we would be following a straight line from the beginning of how to create a human centered venture to arriving at the end of the quarter with a product.  Instead, we’ve been on this spiraling unknowable journey of becoming an effectual entrepreneur.  We had the hardest time getting what it means (really understanding) to be an effectual entrepreneur and to think effectually.  It wasn’t until about week 5 that most of us finally realized in our heads and in our actions what it means to act effectually.

We really loved David’s description of storytelling as “when a yearning meets an obstacle.”  Understanding that from the beginning the effectual entrepreneur is all about story telling was a very important learning.  Through the many pitches (pitch pitch pitch pitch pitch) to attract funding and resources, to attract customers, and to attract talent, the effectual entrepreneur builds their venture.

We struggled with understanding the difference between a product vision and a business vision.

It took us a while to realize that being effectual means always prototyping and going through the trial and error process with the least cost possible.  Just like in designing, a business is also always about prototyping.

And we really liked the class about fine wine growing and “glass tasting” and having another view about what it means to “not know.”

And for our team, one of the hardest things we’ve had to overcome is the very premise of Kickstarter and the crowd sourcing sites which is how to offer a service for a product that isn’t there yet?  It is so counter-intuitive.

The Hardware Team Diagram

hardware team

Reflections from the team:

Because the other groups horded the colored markers, our color scheme isn’t as symbolic and elaborate as we would like.

What really captured us during this quarter is the challenge of finding out that “we don’t know what we don’t know.”  So for us being effectual was figuring out how to generate insights as rapidly as we could.

To help us learn faster, we realized that we had to go through the “Try <=> Fail” loop faster.  We really didn’t understand that the path to success was to fail as fast as we could – to fail forward.

Like the other teams, we realized that we needed to be story telling – with our own team and with our interactions with the other teams since they were dependent on us to come up with a WHOLE product.  Sharing with other teams was a real hassle when we were struggling (and trying to fail fast).  We didn’t want to take time to share those things that weren’t working.

As we get to the end of the quarter, we feel pretty good about how we are working as a hardware team.  However, we don’t feel as good about how we are working with the other teams.  The inter-team coordination is more difficult than we realized.  [NOTE:  This sentiment was shared by the other teams as well.]

How Will You Measure Your Life?

As we finish the quarter and as several of you are close to finishing up your Masters Degree program in HCDE, I am reminded of Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life?  I came across this book at the end of teaching the entrepreneurship class at UW Bothell last spring and immediately sent copies to my three children.

Christensen is the Harvard Business School professor and godfather of the revised theories of innovation which he so articulately captured in The Innovator’s Dilemma.  A couple of years ago Christensen was treated for cancer and during the treatment suffered an ischemic stroke.  During that time he wrote How Will You Measure Your life?,  based on his end of class lecture he gives to his MBA students:

“When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

“My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

“On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes Scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.”

When you get a few moments between quarters, I would urge you to read the HBR article that led to Christensen’s book and think about the implications of how you will apply what you are learning with human centered design and effectual thinking to the rest of your career and life.

Thanks again for a great set of reflections and insights.

Posted in Content with Context, Design, Human Centered Design, Teaching, University, User Experience, Working in teams | 5 Comments

Too Funny for Words – NFL Highlights

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Skip Walter

I cannot remember ever laughing out loud and falling out of my chair while watching an NFL “professional” football game.  However the recent game between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots had us laughing even through our post turkey somnolence.

Thanks to the Huffington Post for their capture of the play under the title “Why Mark Sanchez is the worst Quarterback ever” or as we immediately joked “the game ball goes to Brandon Moore’s ass.”  [Because of NFL copyright content blocking you may need to go to Twitpic to view it.]

GIF: Courtesy of the Jets, this is the worst football play of... on Twitpic

The play starts with Sanchez turning and finding that his running back has gone the wrong way:

QB Mark Sanchez with no one to hand off to

QB Mark Sanchez with no one to hand off to

Trying to recover from the missed handoff, Sanchez runs towards the line of scrimmage only to run into Brandon Moore’s ass:

Sanchez running into Brandon Moore

Sanchez running into Brandon Moore

The ball squirts out from Sanchez and lands at the feet of a Patriots cornerback for a “free” run to the end zone.

Touchdown Patriots

Touchdown Patriots

What a great way to end the Thanksgiving marathon of “pro” football.  And to all a good night.

Posted in Humor | 1 Comment

Some Days You Just Need a little Dilbert

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Skip Walter

As I near the end of another quarter teaching a wonderful group of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) graduate students while juggling consulting clients, I need to ground myself in the eternal wisdom of Dilbert.  Here are a few from the last week that helped me make it through the gray, cloudy, rainy, soggy Northwest early winter.

All you need to know about business strategy - be nimble

All you need to know about business strategy – be nimble

What I hear from most CEOs when it turns to earnings season

What I hear from most CEOs when it turns to earnings season

And we wonder why projects are late

And we wonder why projects are late

Managing or Leading - the eternal paradox of business

Managing or leading – the eternal business paradox

To inject a little humor into consulting engagements when the leadership team seems to have difficulty making a decision, I share the following story of the metaphor we developed for the Digital Equipment Corporation decision process:

It’s like an important baseball game, say the game at the end of the season between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox to determine which one of the teams is going to the World Series. The score is tied 4-4 in the bottom of the ninth in Fenway Park and there are 35,000 screaming fans in the old ballpark. The Red Sox are at bat; the bases are loaded; there are two outs; and the count is 3 and 2 on the batter. The pitcher pitches and the batter strikes a sharp single to left field. The left fielder charges the ball quickly and makes a rocket throw to home. The ball and the base runner arrive at home plate simultaneously in a cloud of dust. The crowd is screaming and going nuts.

As the cloud of dust settles the umpire leans over and asks the catcher if the runner was safe or out. The catcher says he was out, of course. The umpire then asks the same question of the base runner, who asserts that he was safe, of course. The umpire then directs the catcher and the base runner to go over to the dugout and figure out between themselves whether the runner was safe or out. When they have arrived at their decision they should come back to home plate and announce their decision to the crowd AND get the crowd’s buyin!

Posted in Dilbert, Humor | Leave a comment

Review of Empirical Research Through Design

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Skip Walter

Design Research is one of those quirky phrases that I have a difficult time parsing.  Does design research mean that I am doing research on design (itself a tricky word as demonstrated in an article I co-wrote on “Is designing software different than designing other things?“) or does it mean that I am doing research for a design that I am working on? This conundrum came to mind as I was reading “Empirical Research by Design” by David Keyson and Miguel Alonso.

The abstract describes the paper thusly:

“This paper describes the empirical research through design method (ERDM), which differs from current approaches to research through design by enforcing the need for the designer, after a series of pilot prototype based studies, to a-priori develop a number of testable interaction design hypothesis which are then embedded in a working prototype and tested in context with target users. The approach builds on contextual enquiry methods such as context mapping leading to a verifiable working prototype while contributing to fundamental design knowledge. A case study is described to illustrate the application of the ERDM method.”

Context Mapping Tools

As I am always interested in new ways to do prototyping as well as ways to teach graduate students the importance of prototyping, this article had my attention. However, the introduction really caused me to want to read and understand the authors research:

“Research through design focuses on the role of the product prototype as an instrument of design knowledge enquiry. The prototype can evolve in degrees of granularity, from interactive mockups to fully functional prototypes, as a means to formulate, develop and validate design knowledge. The designer-researcher can begin to explore complex product interaction issues in a realistic user context and reflect back on the design process and decisions made based on actual user-interaction with the test prototype. Observations of how the prototype was experienced may be used to guide research through design as an iterative process, helping to evolve the product prototype.”

This introduction captured what I have such a difficult time conveying to students and colleagues that design and research are iterative activities.  Further, this process is all about generating actionable insights.

The authors describe their process in this diagram:

The authors highlight several challenges for the prototyping process.  One of the challenges occurs when getting to the prototype evaluation stage where it is important not to confound the research variables.  For example, if you are trying to study voice versus pen mobile interfaces it is important that the visual interface be the same in both variants.  It is easy to do cumulative designs that vary across multiple dimensions for each test and then your statistical analyses have a hard time sorting out the dependent and independent variables and any significant differences.

Another challenge is whether you need to understand how the prototype will work over time (the longitudinal study). If important, then you need to figure out how to observe a subject’s interactions over several weeks.  A longitudinal study is important as how we interact with something may be different once we become more of an “expert” user.  New designers tend to think of their designs as being timeless when in reality the users needs change over time. One way to do a longitudinal study is with the aid of the user.  Tools like dScout provide the user with an easy way to record their observations and a dashboard for researchers to make sense of the data.

What I especially like about articles that propose a design method or model, is when they include an example of the method in practice and the experimental results.  The authors described the design and evaluation of a fun office professional device – Pause Buddy.  What I found very helpful is that their methodology was clearer to me in the example than in the general description.  The described design method steps in the example were:

  • Hypothesis (this step is so critical and yet so many designers jump into a design process without any working hypothesis)
  • Iteration1 to n
    • Design
    • Participant Study
    • Findings
    • Conclusions – feed forward into next Design Iteration
  • Final Design
  • Final Evaluation

I really liked the two sets of designs that emerged from this Empirical Research Through Design Method (EDRM):

The authors did a great job of illustrating both definitions of “design research” posed in the opening paragraph.  This article contributed both a new method of design research (the research on design research) and provided an example (Pause Buddy) of how to do design research in the context of a particular design brief.

The only thing missing from the methodology I teach in my human centered design (HCD) classes is some notion of the monetization of the design – how will the designers make money with their newly designed product (the value creation).  While they did provide some insights into the human values (the other notion of value in the core HCD process), these values were not connected to the value creation process.

While I was not aware of this research before we started the design of Attenex Patterns, the process we used to design our product was congruent with ERDM.

If you are a practicing human centered designer, or a UX researcher, the ERDM should definitely be a part of your toolkit.  This process nicely encapsulates the power of empirical design research to generate more robust products in a timely fashion and at a reduced cost (get it right at V1 before starting costly manufacturing and distribution).  As a teacher, I look forward to using this article as part of my courses to show how ERDM can lead to more powerful insight generation.

The beauty of an evidence based research article is that it captures key concepts in a few pages.  Usually these articles are enough to convince you of the need for their design research method, but in the few pages there isn’t enough information to begin to practice the new knowledge.  Here are a few of the books I’ve found useful for different types of prototyping:

If you are interested in the richness of design methods, a wonderful book by a former colleague, Vijay Kumar was just published – 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization.  Vijay’s organization of the types of design methods is a must have for any design researcher.

Can you place the ERDM in this framework?  Maybe it can become the 102nd model.

Posted in Attenex Patterns, Content with Context, Design, Human Centered Design, University | 1 Comment

Hiding in Plain Sight

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Skip Walter

While walking on Fourth Avenue in Seattle on a bright autumn day (a route I walk quiet often), an array of multi-colored flowers caught my eye.  I admired their beauty on this sunny day and kept on walking.  About 20 feet later, the sign registered in my slowly reacting mind.  So I retraced my steps and just burst out laughing at the juxtaposition of the company names on the Financial Center’s branding display.

Posted in Humor | 1 Comment

A little eDiscovery Humor

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Skip Walter

As I step back into the world of legal eDiscovery, it is a delight to see that this market segment has finally achieved market notoriety – cartoons are showing up making fun of the work of our dedicated professionals.  CaseCentral is doing a wonderful job with their weekly cartoon on legal humor.  An example of their insightful and wry look at the world surrounds the joys of email:

Yet, an industry’s effect on the world isn’t really felt until it is mocked in Dilbert.  This week Scott Adams captured the foibles of eDiscovery as only his wonderful world view can:

 

 The Dilbert cartoons reminded me of an interaction with Bill Gates, Sr. (author of Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime), during the first year of the development of Attenex Patterns.

An important value that Preston Gates & Ellis (now K&L Gates) brought to the development process was to bring technology industry luminaries by to get demonstrations of what we were up to.  One of the most fun demos that we did was for William H. Gates, Sr (yes, that is Bill Gates dad and one of the named partners for Preston Gates & Ellis).  Gates, Sr. would usually come by Preston Gates in the summer to address the summer associates about his views of what it means to be a lawyer. For this summer visit, Gerry Johnson persuaded Gates, Sr to come by and see that a law firm could fund innovative software development.  Gerry also wanted to give Gates, Sr. visibility into how large the eDiscovery problem was growing for Microsoft since Preston Gates did most of Microsoft’s eDiscovery work.

We prepared more extensively than usual for this demo.  By the time Gates, Sr., arrived to see the demo he was clearly quite tired.  I was concerned that since we were running late we would put him to sleep in a darkened room.  So I shortened my introductory slides and got right to the demo (seen above).

Just at the point that I thought I had put Gates to sleep, he straightened up and looked at me and said “So how many lawyers does it take to annotate a given document and the collection of documents with all those concepts?”

I replied “No lawyers at all.  Our content analytics software is able to figure out all the meaningful concepts within each collection of documents.  Everything you are seeing was done automatically.”

He looked at me again like I hadn’t understood the question, “No.  Really.  How many lawyers did it take to mark up these concepts?”

I repeated “None.”

Bill Gates, Sr., then turned to Gerry Johnson and said “Gerry.  Really.  How many lawyers does it take to identify these concepts?”

Gerry answered “None.”

As the implications of what we’d just demonstrated dawned on him, he asked “Has anybody demoed this to my son Bill, yet?”

Nervously, we all answered that we had not demoed it to anyone at Microsoft yet.

Gates then almost shouted “Well, will you quickly go over and demonstrate this to him so he’ll quit writing those stupid emails that get him in all that trouble with the Justice Department?”

After we stopped convulsing in laughter, we went on with the demo.  Clearly, he understood the implications.

Posted in Attenex Patterns, Dilbert, eDiscovery, Humor, Relationship Capital | Leave a comment

Re-energizing “working” a grape harvest

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Skip Walter

My favorite fine wine growing time of the year is the fall grape harvest, crush, and fermentation.  I shook off my fall lethargy to go spend a couple of days with my favorite wineries in Oregon’s Willamette Valley – Archery Summit and Dominio IV.

Anna Matzinger (on the left) who is a most gifted wine maker was showing us how to sort the pinot noir grapes before they went to the de-stemmer.  There is something wonderfully fulfilling about spending a day on the sorting table contributing just a little bit to the 2012 grape harvest.

As I walked around the winery during a lull in the grape sorting I enjoy the early Halloween gifts of the cold soaks that invite me to shoot way too many photos or the “fog” flowing lightly down hill.

 Today’s grapes were coming from Renegade Ridge, Archery Summit’s biodynamic vineyard that is a few hundred yards away from the winery.  I wandered over the hillside to see what the grapes looked like before they were picked:

 

The Pinot Noir grapes showed the results of an almost perfect growing season.  They were deep purple, tasted so sweetly tart, and showed no signs at all of any molds which can happen in a wet growing season.  As I looked up, I could see the calm before the frenzied activity of the vineyard workings picking off the grape clusters.

As I wandered down the hillside, the rains came in great gulps, the first real rain of the growing season.  With great reluctance, I went back inside the winery and continued the sorting of what I’d just seen picked.

Later that evening, I wandered over to see how Dominio IV was doing with the grape crush.  I arrived just in time to see the master mechanic, Mordechai, at work on the de-stemmer as Leigh Bartholomew (co-owner and vineyard manager extraordinaire) inspected the grapes.  I then enjoyed myself helping sort through the Rhone style grapes (Syrah and Grenache) from the Scorched Earth vineyard.

It just doesn’t get any better than spending a fall day seeing, feeling, and talking about the beginnings of a fine wine.

Posted in Wine, Working in teams | Leave a comment

Find. Copy. Paste. Tweak.

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Skip Walter

“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.  If it was around, it’s an appliance.” – Alan Kay

I keep thinking that nothing can amaze me any more when it comes to technology. Then I come face to face with what normal people can do with the magic of technology.

While waiting for another meeting to start, I was chatting with a long time colleague, Kelly Franznick of BlinkUX.  He shared with me how excited he was with his HCI class (Theory of Interactivity) at Lake Washington Institute of Technology. [For Kelly’s version of this conversation see his post on “Find. Copy. Paste. Tweak.“] It is a class on interaction and he had them focus on an Arduino microprocessor hardware project.  This hardware is a darling of the Maker community.

None of the students had any kind of hardware or software programming background. Yet, here he was showing me their product – a dog activity tracking system.  The three components of the system are pictured below:

The processor (on the left) powered by a 9 volt battery is small enough to attach to a dog collar.  It consists of the Arduino processor with an additional board (on the right) for an RFID tag reader and a wireless communication device.  The wireless receiver is shown in the middle with the USB connecting cable to a computer to log the events from the dog tracker. 

The dog owner then puts RFID tags on things like the dog’s water bowl, food bowl, door to the outside and particular areas where the dog might go in the yard.  Every time a dog goes near one of the RFID tags a message is sent (could be to Twitter) to a database or the owner letting them know that the dog has drunk, eaten, gone outside or is currently in some specific room in the house.  For less than $50 of hardware and open source software, a complete solution was generated by novices in a couple of weeks.

All of the hardware was certainly believable, but I had to ask how humanities majors and architectual technicians and interior designers could program the Arduino.  Had I missed the development of an easy programming tool for the Arduino?

Kelly laughed and said “Nope.  There are no tools other than the C compiler (a very low level programming lanugage).  However, there are thousands of programs (see RFID code) to do different things on the Arduino.  I had the class search for software that was close to what they wanted to do, copy the software from the website, and paste it into the compiler.  Then they start “tweaking” the code (a technical term for blindly making changes to the code to see what happens).  Within minutes the “discovery” was done and the processor was doing something useful and then the students could modify until they got what they wanted.  Certainly none of them really know how to program, yet look at the fully functional hardware/software system they just built.”

Find, copy, paste, tweak.

Very simply that may be the wisdom of crowds authoring tool of the future.

This student project and the pedagogy reminds me of the student projects that Neil Gershenfeld described in FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. The ScreamBody is one of my favorite projects from Gershenfeld’s first Fab class. Clocky is another product to evolve from the class.

As I shared Kelly’s experience with my colleagues, David Robinson marvelled:

“This amazes me. First, I have the impression that there is a magic language (and mindset) for programmers – and this challenges that paradigm. Second, the process you describe is one step shy of a game: what can you do if…. Simple coding seems insurmountable to me and most of my clan – in things as simple as website construction (a step shy of what you are describing but think of the implications if this programming-boundary was breachable!).

“Also, you’ve cracked opened for me yet another facet of the word ‘authoring.’

Thanks for the thought fodder!”

Another colleague, Ross Bohner, suggested that the concept of – find, copy, paste, tweak – was similar to “Code Scavenging” described by Scott Klemmer at Stanford. One of Klemmer’s articles gives the example of Web Bricolage:

“The Web provides a corpus of design examples unparalleled in human history. However, leveraging existing designs to produce new pages is often difficult. This paper introduces the Bricolage algorithm for transferring design and content between Web pages. Bricolage employs a novel, structured prediction technique that learns to create coherent mappings between pages by training on human-generated exemplars. The produced mappings are then used to automatically transfer the content from one page into the style and layout of another. We show that Bricolage can learn to accurately reproduce human page mappings, and that it provides a general, efficient, and automatic technique for retargeting content between a variety of real Web pages.”

In his book Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It, Adrian Slywotzky describes this phenomena in creating a whole product as knowing when to imitate and when to innovate:

“Rather than wasting precious economic fuel and creative energy in designing a great retail website from scratch, Hastings (Netflix) studied Amazon’s and did a 90-percent-plus emulation. Netflix’s site mirrored Amazon’s navigation system, product and button placement, search tools, inclusion of reviews by customers and professional critics, and even the use of small, low-resolution cover images to allow fast Web page loading.

“You might call this strategy ‘Imitate to be unique.’ Of course, it must be used appropriately. The core of a new business design can’t be based on imitation. (In Netflix’s case, the core was “Reliable, convenient, affordable movie rental by Internet and mail.” A unique website design wasn’t part of that definition.) Like great artists and writers, great demand creators shamelessly imitate minor things so they can focus their originality on major things.”

So join the world of Hackademia and start creating technical and innovative marvels:

Find. Copy. Paste. Tweak.

The New Language of Innovation.

Posted in Content with Context, Design, Human Centered Design, Innovation, Learning, Software Development, User Experience, Working in teams | 4 Comments

Wildlife in the San Juan Islands

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Skip Walter

We’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for over 20 years and have never been to the San Juan Islands.  We remedied that over the Fourth of July weekend, when our newest inlaws, the Shellys, invited us to spend a couple of days with them at their cabin on Orcas Island.

As my wife and oldest daughter, Elizabeth Shelly, got ready to leave our home on Bainbridge Island, we were treated to the youngest baby deer we’d ever seen in our backyard sauntering through.

On the early morning drive up to Anacortes, WA, gateway to the San Juans, I was not looking forward to the long wait at the ferry line to get to Orcas Island.  My sister used to live on Guemes Island and one of the memories of visiting her in the summer is the huge long lines of cars waiting to catch the ferry.  I wanted no part of that as we have our own challenges with the Bainbridge Island ferry in the summer with all the tourists clogging things up.

Imagine my surprise when we arrived an hour early at the ferry terminal and it was clear that we were going to make the next boat.  That was easy.  We arrived at the cabin and immediately went for a walk on the beach (see interactive 360 view):

We couldn’t wait to take an extended family outing to Mt Constitution in Moran State Park.  Somehow our weather karma finally gave us some spectacular weather and we were treated to the clearest view of the Puget Sound from Seattle and Mt Rainier in the South to Vancouver in the North (360 view).

The birds were out showering us with their chatter:

While we were exploring the island, we came across this sign at North Beach near the town of East Sound:

During our two days with the extended Shelly family, we’d had the gift of listening to the never ending stories that Suzanne and Robert shared with their two children.  “Imagine. Create. Pretend.  Turn any time into story time.” What special advice for adults to do with children along with remembering to do it for ourselves.

As we continued our island tour, we went by the Rosario Resort.  While Jamie and Elizabeth listened to a mini-organ recital, I walked behind the old mansion to view the inlet.  I couldn’t believe the number of starfish that were making their way over the rocks as the tide came in:

We also couldn’t escape one of those priceless philosophical questions as we passed by a local shellfish farm:

All too soon our time on Orcas Island was over and it was time to head over to Friday Harbor and San Juan Island. Just after we arrived on the island we headed out to Lime Kiln Point State Park to see if we could view some Orca Whales within sight of the shore. Little did we know that we were in for the treat of our short visit to the San Juans.  Just as we arrived at the viewing point, a pod of three whales came within 50 feet of the rocks that we were standing on.  Here are just a few of the hundreds of photos of the whales that we shot at three separate times during the day:

We headed up to Roche Harbor Resort for lunch (a little to East Coast Newport Beach snobby for us) and then came back across the island to visit American Camp National Historic Park. We took the time to hike several miles within the park and visit one of the oldest redoubts left on display.  As we left the park, a huge eagle flew right over our car and landed in a nearby tree.  I quickly moved the car to the side of the road to grab some pictures of an eagle up close:

As I got too close for comfort, the eagle took wing:

What a day.  So we slowly pulled our car back onto the park road, and out popped a fox. I felt like I was at Disney World with an unseen director shouting “cue the fox.”

On such a lucky day for the fauna of San Juan Island, we decided to drive back over to Lime Kiln Point State Park to see if the whales were still around.  We got to watch two more pods come back south close to shore:

As we turned to walk away, one of the other tourist observers pointed to a seal close to the rocks:

What a full day of wild life viewing.  Who knew that the San Juan Island was such a repository of wild life.  After dinner, we meandered our way back to our room at Lakedale Resort Lodge (360 degree view) and darn near drove the car off the road as we looked up and saw a camel in the field.  Come on, a camel in the Pacific Northwest.  We had to stop and get a photo:

We were really excited to get up the next morning for another day of whale watching.  We headed out early to Lime Kiln Point State Park but saw none of the whale watching boats that flooded the area the day before.  We waited around for over an hour but saw no whales.  So we decided to head up to English Camp National Historic Park.  What a beautiful little park nestled away on the west side of the island with massive old cedars and a quaint English garden.

With delight in our hearts from the beautiful weather and the gifts of nature, we headed back to Friday Harbor to catch the ferry to Anacortes.

One of those wonderful surprises happened the following Monday evening after I finished teaching my “Designing for Demand” course at the UW Foster School MBA program.  Karthik, one of my students, came up to me at break with his iPad showing a photo of an Orcas Whale.

I had included one of my Orcas Whale photos at the beginning of my lecture slides. Karthik asked me where I’d taken the photo and we both laughed when I shared that it was off San Juan Island.  Karthik had also ventured up to Friday Harbor and had taken one of the whale watching boat trips.  On Saturday while we were looking for the whales on the west side of San Juan Island, the whales had migrated to the south side of Orcas Island where Karthik captured his photos.  That’s when I realized how lucky we were with our full day of viewing the whales from shore at Lime Kiln Point State Park.

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Listening for Life

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Skip Walter

In the late 1980s, Donna Stoering showed up in our lives in Southern New Hampshire when my wife sang with Donna in the St. Elizabeth Seton church choir. Donna gave us one of those gifts that keeps on giving when she asked if she could sponsor us to a Cursillo Weekend.  Jamie and I had seen the incredible difference that Cursillo made in the lives of several of our friends so we readily agreed.

The Cursillo process has separate Men’s and Women’s weekends with the men usually attending the three day weekend first and then the women attending a weekend often scheduled within a month of the men’s weekend.  The NH Cursillos are usually held at the Sarto Center several rural miles outside of Manchester, NH.

Donna picked me up and dropped me off at the Sarto Center and then with a cheery goodbye left me in the midst of 30 men I didn’t know.  She made sure that I didn’t have a car so that I couldn’t leave the weekend if things got “tough.”  In retrospect, the weekend was one of those transformative events that change one’s world view and approach to life. During the weekend, I treated the experience more as an academic exercise and went into my cocoon of silent observer.

At the end of the weekend with great energy and emotion the larger Cursillo community came flooding into our meeting room singing the rooster song – De Colores.  Donna was one of the first Cursillistas in the room singing so vibrantly and she immediately came up and gave me one of her wonderful hugs. My bottled up emotions from the weekend came flowing out.

As we all calmed down, our wonderful “three amigos” guitar players started playing and singing “Here I am Lord” by Dan Schutte (hear the song played and sung by Dan Schutte).

I, the Lord of sea and sky,
I have heard my peo-ple cry.
All who dwell in dark-ness now
My hand will save.

I who make the stars of night,
I will make their dark-ness bright.
Who will bear my light to them?
Whom shall I send?

Here I am, Lord. It is I Lord.
I have heard you call-ing in the night.
I will go, Lord, where you lead me.
I will hold your peo-ple in my heart.

I, the Lord of snow and rain,
I have borne my peo-ple’s pain.
I have wept for love of them.
They turn a-way.

I will break their hearts of stone,
Give them hearts for love a-lone.
I will speak my words to them.
Whom shall I send?

Here I am, Lord. It is I Lord.
I have heard you call-ing in the night.
I will go, Lord, where you lead me.
I will hold your peo-ple in my heart.

I, the Lord of wind and flame,
I will tend the poor and lame.
I will set a feast for them.
My hand will save.

Fin-est bread I will pro-vide,
Till their hearts be sat-is-fied.
I will give my life to them.
Whom shall I send?

Here I am, Lord. It is I Lord.
I have heard you call-ing in the night.
I will go, Lord, where you lead me.
I will hold your peo-ple in my heart.

When we hit the phrase “I will break their hearts of stone,” I looked up at Donna and thanked her for the gift of a new spiritual life.

It wasn’t that long after the Cursillo Weekend that we moved to Seattle.  No matter how much you want to stay in touch with special friends distance gets in the way.  We followed Donna’s career as a world class pianist and swapped periodic letters, but our physical world paths crossed precious few times until last Thursday night.  Donna and her current husband, Andy Anderson, stopped by on their way to a wedding in Mt Vernon, WA.  We had not met Andy, so we were delighted to get to know him.

Most of the evening was spent catching up on where our respective journeys had taken us and most especially learning about the journeys of our respective children. At the very end of the evening one of those “oh, by the way” synergistic moments popped out of the universe when Donna shared that she was in the process of fund raising for her Listen for Life for profit entity.  She was particularly excited about the Travels with Music project which is currently in DVD ROM form and will be released as a series of Apps in the fall.

I was excited about the depth and breadth of what Donna had done since founding her organization in 1998:

“At Listen for Life we envision a world where all music cultures are valued and appreciated as the channel for communication. We are dedicated to the service of music through a variety of international and local outreach projects, and by creating a global family of music performers, teachers, creators and listeners.

“Listen for Life is a global organization created for the preservation and advancement of musical culture by serving the needs of music, musicians and music listeners in every region of the world. Through our variety of outreach, education and media projects, we aim to create an international family of music listeners, in community with those who compose, teach, and perform all of the wonderfully diverse musical styles that can be heard on the planet.

“Listen for Life was founded in London, England, in 1998. It then grew eastwards around the globe to encompass volunteers or affiliate studios in many countries, and it recently established new development and administrative offices in Oakland, California, USA.

“One of our goals is to encourage musicians themselves and enable their growth, through workshops, master classes and international retreats. We also encourage them by offering new performance, recording and broadcasting opportunities to relatively unknown but deserving musicians throughout the world.

“To serve both the musicians and the music listeners, and therefore to help advance the cause of music itself around the globe, Listen for Life has developed into an international umbrella organization for a series of outreach projects, with each project happening in many different locations around the world.”

The Listen for Life website is full of sample videos from the project and interviews with musicians from around the world.

I couldn’t believe the timing.  My colleagues and I recently founded a company to produce an integrated media content authoring and sharing tool.  One of the forms of media that we were missing along with the associated expertise was music.  Here was over 400 hours of professionally produced music, and even better it came with associated videos, games and text.  Just the kind of content we are looking for to test the bounds of our tool and to help us do the user research on what “integrated media” really means.

I do love the synchronicity of the universe – “when the student is ready the professor will show up.”  I can’t wait to learn from Professor Stoering.

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