Vision in Design - A guidebook for Innovators - Book Capture

p14 -
ViP is a design method which is context- driven, and interaction-centred. It offers designers and students of design - again, of any kind, a unique way of coming up with products that bring people (new) meaning or value.
Why products are the way they are:
1. People need social relationships, and want to belong to (a group of) other people.
2. People are impatient and want things to happen instantly.
3. People love sharing (little) secrets.
4. People communicate their feelings more easily in an indirect way.


p15-
Interactions with products do not take place in a vacuum. Both products and people are part of, and shaped by, a context. This context is much more than the momentary, physical environment in which the interaction takes place, like the bar in the SMS example above. The context of any interaction is also composed of social and cultural conditions, laws of (human) nature, economic and technological changes, etc. In sum, a seemingly endless number of mechanisms - we will call these 'factors' later - co-determine what people are and need, and what products could or should provide.

p16 -17

• Designing (according to ViP) is about exploring what is possible tomorrow instead of solving the problems of today
• Designing is not only the making manifest of some (physical) object, but foremost the generating and development of the idea that provides it (the product) with a raison d'etre (the reason for existence).
• A designer is an individual with preferences, values, beliefs, and desires, like all other human beings

p17-18

...key values needed for any designer who wishes to follow this approach (ViP): freedom, responsibility and authenticity.

Freedom means liberty from the restrictions (to move in a certain direction) made by external forces unless they are agreed upon 

Responsibility means an attitude of complete awareness and acceptance of the consequences regarding any decisions made; and 

Authenticity is the hallmark of a personally genuine and unique contribution to a future world.

The 3 values are clearly related, and can be easily opposed to traits like docility, indifference, and pretending. Only if you are free can you act authentically, and acting authentically evidently leads to responsibility.

p20- 

"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." (Simon, 1996, p.11) - The sciences of the artificial

p22-23

Solutions that fundamentally change the way people interact with products can only emerge if the designer wants to change the meaning of a product-user relationship.

p38 - 

When we say 'build a context', we mean 'bring together all kinds of forces' - we call them factors - ' that together shape the world the designer is designing for'. The thing is, there is not one single context, so it's impossible to incorporate all the possible factor of a given context. So a context is always the result of a selection  and a combination process: choosing what to include and deciding how to bring it together. To help designers collect factors, we have defined 4 conceptually distinct types [developments, trends, states and principles] The term ;principles' refers to laws of nature, e.g. or of the human mind.

p.40 - 

ViP is about focusing on the most relevant ideas instead of creating all kinds of ideas that will need further reduction. The beauty of working with ViP is that its purpose is not just to come up with some idea but also grasping that this idea is the one to go for.

So, when I say ;design starting points' I'm usually describing how I want people to act in a future situation. The design starting points were not the need to create an elegant or beautiful kiosk, as the initial assignment stated. The starting points are the desired interaction that people would have with the products,  which in this case are combined in a kiosk service.

p41-

p42 - 

The ViP angle is that segmentation is not based on people's characteristics - age, sex, lifestyle, etc. - but on contextual differences (time of the day, in a hurry etc.) Basically, the concerns touched upon are a reflection of the designer's context. They have not been defined beforehand, nor based on what is currently at play, nor based on targeting a specific user group.

In ViP we design for anyone who shares concerns and wants the kind of interaction we envision. This may mean that some people are excluded, people who have other concerns and want other interactions. 

p48 - car Pininfarina Nido, 2004 example

Zapping is the act of switching from one activity to another in a very hedonistic way (Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that pleasure is the primary or most important intrinsic good. )

p50 -

ViP is not about being afraid of existing product domains; ViP is about defining appropriate product qualities and being about to design products that express this meaning

T- Even if the type of manifestation is fixed - a car for example - ViP can enable you to redefine what a car is and could be

p52 - 

So for the Nido, what was that belief (believe people would like to do) based on?

The context factors I mentioned earlier. Things like hedonism, breaking with traditional patterns, cultural diversity, an overload of offering, and the condensed city environment.

p54 - 56

How do you know a principle is relevant?

By attempting to understand exactly what kind of quality is needed from the mechanism, and which physical principle will help you to translate what you want to achieve. You match up the desired mechanical performance and the way the product as a whole id perceived by its user

Basically what you do is reason from the vision (statement/interaction/meaning) to a concept solution that has the character you want it to have, interacts with the user in the desired way, and fulfils the goal you set in the statement.

Of course you need knowledge of the world (and the principles governing it) and how people experience this world in order to move from vision to concept. Without the proper vision, you would never come up with an innovative mechanism 

Yet without the proper domain knowledge (in this case: mechanical engineering, physics) the solution wouldn't come either. Both are needed to make the transition, especially in a complex domain. That's why designers need to know and understand what is possible under what laws, how materials and other properties behave, how people perceive and experience things, etc. in order to conceptualise a feasible solution that fits the vision.

p62 -

If a particular tax system exists, they want it to be more user-friendly; cheaper, etc. As a result, the designer may try to fix the original system. But the core of the system stays the same, and no matter how much is changed, new frustrations and needs will arise. So, the core of designing (according to ViP) is envisioning a system that fits into the world of tomorrow. People will recognise its unexpected, anticipated quality and be satisfied.

I remember how difficult is was; we didn't know where to start ourselves at first. We could sense that reducing time and money was not the way to optimize the relationship between the government and the populace. The essence of ViP is to start from context research, which helps locate the doorway to new insights. 

EXAMPLES OF PRINCIPLE< STATE 

• Principle: In an organized society, people always need checks and balances
• State: National and local governments are bureaucratic
• State: Government services always assume the people's distrust when they design their services
• Principle: Reciprocity In social psychology, reciprocity is a social rule that says we should repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. is a characteristic of social relationships as a starting point for sense making, identification, and trust.
• Principle: To be able to take responsibility, people must be able to direct possibilities; without choices it is impossible to take responsibility

p68 - government 3x3 grid

The model never led to ONE design, nut to a design framework. Depending on the goal/statement a particular place in the model could be chosen.

A design is something with meaning. That something is a combination of features and properties that express this meaning. 

p72 -

I agree with you that not everybody is happy with an idea like this. But that's precisely why it works. This idea is a reflection of the goal defined by the government. If someone doesn't feel engaged with the goal the options are to accept that that person is just being him-or herself, or try to make that person change their behaviour, for instance, increasing the tax enormously for having a dog without a 'proof of good behaviour'. In a way, the desire to be in control of your dog is a universal principle. 

p79 - 

What justifies a design education at a university, what makes design education academic, is related to this idea of context building, that's where you need science.

Scientific insights and scientific research are needed in order to build the context, in order to establish viable starting points for a design. That's what we teach the students with ViP: to actually build a context on the basis of observations from research, but also on the basis of principles from science, and/or from the humanities. All the skills relate to building a context are very much skills that belong to university students. That depth or that level of complexity isn't present at an art school.

Since a ViP designer builds the context from principles that are mostly grounded in science, and on developments from the world at large, that context is, to a certain extent, solidified in the world. It has its foundations in the world out there. Although the designer shows personal discernment when selecting factors, and deciding how everything is brought together, the context is rooted in the world, and users will recognise that.

WE want to take the best of both worlds: give room to feelings and intuition as they do at art schools, but simultaneously require students to develop a sound argument, in order to justify and explain each and every decision they make, which means understanding where each decision comes from and what its consequences are. ViP is about reasoning from top - the context - to bottom - the product - a kind of 'system thinking'.

p 87 - 

DEFINITION OF DOMAIN

domain is the focus of your design activity, the area you're working in. It can be a 'problem', but not necessarily. It could be a particular phenomenon, or an area of life. 

QUALITIES OF A DOMAIN

1. The domain has to suit the time that has been allocated to the design process
2. the domain has to fit the strategy of the company. A car manufacturer wont' readily adopt 'public transport' as a domain
3. the domain must feel natural to the designer.. Some designers prefer to get very specific with their domain, whereas others like to remain quite open.

p93 -

Don't think in terms of 'needs' too much. That's what marketers tend to do. We prefer to talk about such things as principles (of human thinking, behaviour, concerns, etc) and trends (temporary or culturally dominated patterns of behaviour).

p 104-

By 'interaction', we mean the qualitative relationship between the user and the product. 

"The interaction can be characterized by/as"

----

session 1 >design is about contexts, not solutions (86)

session 2> the domain (87)

session 3&4> deconstruction (90-96)

e.g. Davenport 

• people like to show off their status/wealth
• people prefer order/unity
• in Victorian times, people were interested in classifying the world around them
• a house/home has limited space
• people want to protect their (inner) secrets/thoughts/feelings from others

session 5 & 6>New context (97-101)

• development: The weather will be getting warmer which means that people will be spending more time outside
• development: There will be an increasing amount of distraction from all sides
• trend: People will want to stay home more often because of congestion
• trend: Home and work life will become increasingly integrated, due to increasing gender equality
• development: The world will be a more open and transparent place, because of the increasing generation of and access to (shared) information
• development: There will be an increasing obsession with security, due to increased opportunities for information sharing and storage
• principle: People like to have a feeling of "their place" in the world.

session 7> Structure in context + statement 

How do you want people to behave in relation to the distilled structure of your 7 context factors?

"I want to offer people..."

"I want to enable people..."

"I would like people to see/experience..."

"to feel... to understand..."

People feeling secure enough when working from home that they can work productively an creatively; keeping in touch with, and helping, society; and at the same time exploiting the challenges that the world has to offer

making clusters "feel safe with family" "outside unpredictable, anxiety - positive/discomfort"

session 8 & 9> Statement + interaction

session 10> Product qualities

Instead of describing what a person would feel, describe the qualities of a product that would elicit a feeling of 'peaceful submission'

Interaction:

• peaceful submission
• cognitive priviledge-ness

Product:

• a larger idea "something you don'r quite understand"
• integrity
• trustworthy
• fair
• wise and just
• unitity in variety

session 11>Concept development

-------

p 119 

p120 - Stages of ViP design approach are grounded on 3 basic principles, which we call starting points:

1. A designer's job is to look for possibilities, and possible futures, instead of simply solve present-day problems
2. Products are a means to accomplish or develop appropriate interactions (relationships). In interactions with people, products obtain their meaning. This is why we say that ViP is interaction-centred
3. The appropriateness of any interaction conceived by a designer is determined by the context for which it has been designed. This context can be the world of today, tomorrow, or may lie years in the future. Future contexts may demand new behaviours and experiences. 

p133 - 8 steps of the process embedded in the ViP model

p 137

Step 1: Establish the domain (loosely, socio-cultural)

Step 2: Generation of context factors (originality)

Step 3: Structuring the context (factors correlate positively & negatively) p149

2 types of clusters:

• Common-quality clusters: a combination of factors that all point to the same (underlying) direction and together form a 'meta-factor'. Say for a particular domain you have found the factors "people go to gym more often", there is an increasing demand for vitamin supplements" and "many people want food that is organically produced". You could combine these into the one factor " people want greater control of their health".
• Emergent - quality cluster: by bringing together various factors, a new factor might emerge that is not represented by the factors separately. For example, the 2 factors "teenagers spend two hours per day on gaming" and "employees increasingly work extra hours" could be combined into one emerging factor "disintegration of family life"

Look for relationship of clusters:

• Pattern or storyline: when you look at all your clusters "from a distance", a pattern or thread may appear that unites the clusters into a sort of narrative. This may eventually even be phrased into a main theme, like the theme of a movie or a song, which holds everything together.
• Dimension:  when clusters seem to conflict or refer to opposing factors, it may be meaningful to place them in one or more polar and conceptually clearly distinct dimensions. Each dimension thus represents two different possible futures. Although more than two dimensions may be needed to locate all clusters, for purposes of representation and interpretation, two are often optimal

p153 

Step 4: Statement definition

"I, (the designer), or we, (the company), want people to feel/see/express/experience/understand/be able to/etc. X or Y (by A or B...)"

E.g. picked parent type 2 - top right

"EasyWalker wants to enable parents to raise their children with a laissez faire mentality"

Step 5: Establishing a relationship: designing human-product interaction

Vision: liking learning to walk on your parents feet

Product: playful, versatile, physical

Step 6: Defining product qualities

Step 7: Concept design, or 'concepting'

p176

To evaluate if your concept is the 'right' one, you can ask the following questions:

• Does it fit with all the elements of your vision?
• Is it the most effective concept (in relation to the statement) with the 'minimum of means' (features applied?
• Does the concept 'make sense'? Is it acceptable (or even desirable) to people?

...The only way to convince people that your concept make sense is to evoke the future context with them: make them feel and understand the future context where the concept fits. ..

Step 8: Design and detailing

p188-189

The process of looking, reflecting, then booking again is essential to the deconstruction phase of ViP. 

At first you might find it difficult, but with practice, this way of 'seeing' products becomes natural.

p205

Difference between the concept of 'context' in ViP & concept of 'scenario planning'. 

In scenario planning, designers look for the driving forces within in a particular domain (trends)... that are developing, changing. Designers planning a scenario basically ask "what are the possible futures?" And they often come up with 2 broadly definable dimensions as driving forces, such as 'individualism vs collectivism' and 'worldwide threats vs global peace'... What if we have individualism and peace. They develop these scenarios not to stimulate or provide direction for product development; they make the scenarios to prepare themselves. The scenario thinkers are anticipating what might happen. And it suits a decision maker on the board of Shell to decide whether to buy a particular platform....

 

In ViP, what we do with the context is not just describe a possible world, but the world - even a future one- the designer actually sees it. And the designer has to defend it, take responsibility for it, invest in it. 

p234- Despite the similarities between the "scenario building method" and the use of context in ViP, scenario approaches are fundamentally different in that they are based on (the most) likely futures. By contrast, through ViP we aim to build interesting futures to design for.

P208

…if you only react to things that are changing, you miss more fundamental things. So when you look at tomorrow or the near futures, or the distant future, you should also consider the factors that will remain pretty much stable over time. For ViP, these factors com in two forms: states and principles.

E.g. Automotive design

Principles:

·      People want to survive

·      People want to understand the causes of their actions

·      A moving object will always be affected by friction

·      People want to protect themselves from the environment

·      Men are still hunter gatherers who want to show their masculinity to women

·      People are thrilled by speed and horsepower

Definition of principle

p.208 - A principle is a fixed phenomenon, something that was so in the past and will remain the same in the future. To us, these phenomena don’t have to be scientifically proven to have this fixed status, but they must appear as fixed in the eyes of the designer.

p. 233 - Immutable laws or general patterns that can be found in human beings or nature

p.209

Principle that is behind almost any product: ‘ people want things to be as easy as possible’.

p.209

Principles are implicit, whereas trends and developments are often explicit. Something that is changing is much more visible than something that stays the same. We only notice things when they start to change. That’s why people animals freeze when they are in danger.

p233 e.g. 'our capacity to process information seems to be limited to approximately seven chunks' (Miller, 1956); 'we generally prefer colours in the order blue, green or red, and yellow' (McManus, Jones & Cottrell, 1981); and "memes" can , by analogy with genes, be conceived of as units of information transmission in the field of cultural evolution" (Dawkins, 1976).

Definition of development

p209 - …Development is something in technology, society, or the economy, that si changing over time but also relates to changing human attitudes and values.

e.g. people value their personal space more and more

p 233- factors concerns a phenomenon that is currently changing, or one that is expected to change in the future

e.g. development can be in the fields of technology (e.g. arrival of Bluetooth) ; society (e.g. the increasing number of double-income families), economics (e.g. rising interest rates), or demographics (e.g. the continuing increase in the ageing population)

Definition of trend

p209A trend is specifically about changes in human behavior

e.g. people watch television more often

e.g. people eat out more often

p233 - special class of developments is constituted by factors concerning tendencies in the behaviour, values or preferences of people.

e.g. among teenagers, it is currently a trend to send hundreds of text messages per week; in many households it is 'trendy' not to cook at all or, conversely, to prepare immense, five course meals.

p.216

Interaction is a relationship. What’s important about it being a relationship is that it simultaneously describes the role of the user and the role of the product. The relationship describes user aspects like feelings, experiences, intentions, and the like, while simultaneously describing properties of the thing. 

How to persuade the client about ViP

First of all, the client has to examine their underlying company motives, and be very honest about their current position commercially, socially and culturally. If there is denial in this regards, and their action is not grounded in some form of profound insight, then there is no reason to start any kind of ViP- based project. Any money invested would be lost. On top of that, the client has to be convinced to trust the ViP process, and actually commit to the outcomes. I they have any fixed ideas about new products, processes or organizations; this can be a formidable task.

Designing with ViP is like conducting scientific research: there is no way of knowing beforehand what the outcome will be; we have to ask the client to allow for that. Through ViP, a designer often has the opportunity to advise a company to product ‘things’ they are not used to. A lot of people in the organization may reject such changes.

Often clients think they are experts in their domain – and they are! – but they also make the mistake of imposing a present-day solution on their design problem, rather than considering future possibilities… Most of the time, their solution is product-oriented, and doesn’t reflect our aim: to be end-user-experience oriented.

P231

The client consists of all kinds of factors that affect the way people )might) perceive, use, experience, respond and relate to products. It describes the nature of the human-product interaction. Context factors describes the nature of the human-product interaction. Context factors are conditions or patterns in the world as observed by the designer.  They can be classified in 3 different ways: types, fields or levels.

p232

• 4 Types: State / principle (fixed) ; development / trend (flux during moment of observation
• Fields: biology, economics, politics, ecology, sociology, psychology <-- most important...Subfields: developmental psychology, social psychology, cultural psychology, evolutionary psychology, perception and psychophysics... we like to see technology as a means to actually achieving a designed interaction, rather than as a factor determining the way that interaction takes place
• Level: directed related to domain (micro level: e.g. people anticipate the driving behavior of fellow road users) ; or very abstract and further away from domain (the macro level: e.g. people want to survive) <-- therefore, look back domain

p235

Opting for safe factors has the advantage of creating a context containing likely and defendable elements: selecting less obvious and more personal factors increases the likelihood of coming up with a fresh, new and authentic perspective. In our view, the important thing is that the designer is aware of where he positions himself on this 'certainty' scale.

p 241

CONTEXT

HUMAN

Motor System --> Motor Skills

Sensory Systems ---> Sensitivity

Cognitive System ---> Cognitive Skills

Instincts ---> Concerns

PRODUCT

Sensory Properties <--- Structural Properties

Possibilities for behaviour & Functionality <--- Materials ; Composition l Technology ; Labels

HUMAN- PRODUCT INTERACTION

p250 - 251

Norman (1988) adapted this concept of affordance and introduced it to the design field. To Norman, affordances refer to all properties of a thing that determine how the thing could possibly be used, whether learned or not. For Norman, buttons afford pushing, handles afford pulling, and track wheels afford turning. To account for the fact that actual usage is often unpredictable and depends very much on the situation in which the interaction takes place, others (cf. Boess & Kanis, 2008) have proposed the term "usecue" as an alternative to affordance: " A usecue is any characteristic that people use (not might use) to attribute functional meaning to a product" (p.322)...

• functionality, e.g. the service provided by a regular airline can be perceived as more supportive  and inviting  than the services offered by a low-cost carrier
• form, e.g. an elongated object, rising upward, is perceived as more dominant  and proud (cf Van Rompay et al, 2005)
• color, e.g. while a bluish yellow tends to cool cold, a reddish yellow seems warm (cf. Arnheim, 1974)
• material, e.g. metal is perceived as more elegant and less toy-like than plastics (Karana & et al., 2009)
• sound, e.g., a high-pitched and rough epilator sound is perceived as conspicuous and alarming,  whereas the low-pitched droning sound of a ventilator is perceived as inconspicuous  and soothing (Ozcan, 2008)
• movement or bahviour, e.g., a door that automatically opens rapidly, with no pause, is seen as most approachable (Ju & Takayama, 2009; Desmet et al, 2008)

p.290

People generally resist change; while innovation is often needed to maintain competitive edge, implementing required changes or improve ments can sometimes make waves within the company. An innovator has to find ways to overcome resistance at every level, from executive suites to work floor. To do so, new ideas, directions, methods and modes of innovation process management may need to be developed  and incorporated (Kuhn, 1993)... Innovation is business oriented, and design -driven

p290-291

Design-driven innovation is primarily inspired by what might have meaning in the future, and doesn't address current user needs, as most user0centred innovation methodologies do (Ijuri & Kuhn, 1988). The outcomes of design-driven innovation come in the form of options that make it possible for users to embrace new meaning. "Design driven designers - together with the organization they work for - are responsible for the development of meaning products or services that shape the future world. In this sense, design-driven innovation is closer to a technology product (Gaynor, 1996)- than to user-centred innovation, which can be seen as a form of market pull.

Innovation of meaning, "is incremental when a product adopts a design language and delivers a message that is in line with the current evolution of socio-cultural models..." What Verganti terms 'radical innovation' " happens when a product has a language and delivers a message that implies a significant interpretation of meanings.

Verganti (2008) mentions that commercial success takes time to occur, particularly in the case of radical design-driven innovation: "Users need the time to understand the radically new language and message of design driven innovation to find connections to their [socio-cultural] context, and to explore new symbolic values and patterns of interaction with the product".

p292- Since novel products are by definition not typical, and similarly, typical products are not novel, the question was raised how novelty and typicality jointly determine our preferences. Hekkert et al (2003) found that novelty can be optimized without a severer loss of typicality, and showed products optimizing the two simultaneously are most preferred: what are perceived as attractive design strike a delicate balance between novelty and typicality. This was coined the 'MAYA principle' - Most advanced, Yet Acceptable - a principle that had been intuitively proposed by Raymond Loewy 50 years earlier/

The MAYA principle explains why innovative products are often not appreciated instantaneously. A fair amount of familiarity needs to be developed first. One of the ways to establish this familiarity is by exposure: if we are exposed to something frequently, our familiarity with it increases, and so does out liking for it. This 'mere exposure' effect was already assumed and test by Zajonc (1968)

p294

Appropriateness refers to the degree of fit between the product and the context in which is consumed. More precisely, appropriateness signals if a human-product relationship fits in with its socio-cultural environment. Changes in this socio-cultural context thus determine if new meaning for products are needed. The context creates a frame of relevance for what kinds of products are beneficial for people in the future.

...'novelty' can be defined as the introduction of new features in products and/or services, or by the introduction of new technologies used in products and serves, the latter leading to a more radical type of innovation (Ijuri & Kuhn, 1988). New meaning arises when people have a new inteaction with the product or services. Analogous to Martindale's model, a shift in style resembles a shift in interaction quality between user and product. A paradigm shift in product design this deals with the introduction of new interactions required to fit the future context. 

In conclusion, it is important to point out that it is not always necessary to design new meaning. The context determines if the introduction of new meaning is needed.

p297

Consciousness is very good at following rules, solcing logical problems and convergent thinking. But due to its limited capacity, conscious thought is mostly top-down, relying heavily on existing schemas, expectancies and stereotypes. Although stereotypes are activated unconsciously, it is our consciousness that makes most use of them. Studies confirming this effect made Dijksterhuis and Nordgren (2006) conclude"...it is hard to avoid "jumping to conclusions" when on thinks consciously. It may feel as if one is processing information with the goal of making a decision when what really -unknowingly - is doing is processing information with the foal of confirming an expectance." The unconscious is less rule-based, associative and more divergent, thereby increasing the likelihood of generating original ideas. From all this evidence, tis is safe to conclude that designers - like all decision makers - should trust their (thorough) unconscious processing skills more. Call it intuition.

p302

Brown (1991)

People of all cultures and throughout the ages:

• like to share and give gifts
• seek adventure, diversity and excitement
• are more likely to help attractive people
• have some form of etiquette
• share moral sentiments
• aesthetically prefer 'order-in-chaos' or 'unity in variety'
• use figurative language such as metaphors and metonyms
• get bored over time
• infer the mental states and intentions of others
• need authority
• are prone to altruistic behavior
• wish to stand out from others
• impose meaning on the world
• tend to overestimate the objectivity of their thought
• rarely know the cases of their own behaviour
• engage in magic, poetry and pretend play
• are prone to learn and explain the unknown
• and are able to recognize pictorial representations without previous training

p.306

"The social and cultural are not alternatives to the biological. They are aspects of evolved human biology[...]" (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992)

"There is no question of opposing nature versus nurture; nurture is just one of the many forms that nature may take" Tomasello, 1999

"Behaviours is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals." (Pinker, 2002)

p307

To illustrate how cultural and individual manifestations can be explained (and predicted) on the basis of universal, psychological mechanisms, we turn to two universal principles in the field of user experience. Designing two decades (e.g., Desmet & Hekkert, 2007; Schifferstein & Hekkert, 2008). Recognized as one of the components of product experience, Hekkert, Snelders and van Wieringen (2003) found evidence supporting the operation of the "MAYA principle" in people's aesthetic response. This principle or originality (advanced) while maintaining an optimal level of familiarity or typicality (acceptable). The evolutionary logic behind this principle is that both exposing oneself to the new enhances fitness, in that it facilities learning , and staying close to the familiar has survival value, by decreasing the risk of jumping into a life-threatening adventure (Bornstein, 1989). 

p313

Methodologies

Understand the act of designing requires methodology, but a methodology cant help to the designer react to the world with the designs he or she makes.

p314

I think the difference between design education an design practice is that in education you ask someone to produce three concepts. The way they evaluate those concepts is to look back and say, "Does it fit with the problem we've got? How suitable is this concept? Ah yes this one is about 89% fitting, this one only 75% therefore we're going to choose the first one" But in practice, these concepts are really only discussed. "This direction goes this way, this direction does that way, let's talk about it." The designer is establishing a connection with someone that really wants something. For a student, who is the connection with? It's an academic exercise that announces "OK, my process is well-balanced because I cam up with this variable, I analysed the problem in this way, and this solution optimized the variable". The student is always looking backwards.

... example of a painter, I think a designer should have the opportunity to work as a painter. He should kind of create his won frame of reference to understand what he really wants to do, what positions he wants to take in this world. Is there a methodology that supports a designer creating a kind of internal reference? Because I think that' what a methodology should do. Otherwise those 3 options, the 3 concepts, are just options - without any predetermined meaning, they 'explode' in every direction. This isn't efficient designing. 

The Makers - Book Capture

p 13(?) - We are all Makers. We are born Makers (just watch a child's fascination with drawings, blocks, Lego, or crafts), and many of us retain that love in our hobbies and passions. It's not just about workshops, garages, and man caves... These projects represent the ideas, dreams, and passions of millions of people. Most never leave the home, and that's probably no bad thing. But one of the most profound shifts of the Web Age is that there is a new default of sharing online. If you do something, video it. If you video something, post it. If you post something, promote it to your friends. Projects shared online become inspiration for others and opportunities for collaboration. Individual Makers, globally connected this way, become a movement. Millions of DIYers, once working alone, suddenly start working together.


p 21 - When the Web taught us was the power of ' network effects': when you connect people and ideas, they grow. It's a virtual circle - more people combined create more value, which in turn attracts even more people, and so on. That's what has driven the ascent of Facebook, Twitter, and practically every other successful company online today. What Makers are doing is taking the DIY movement online - ' making in public' - which introduces network effects on a massive scale.

Maker movement characteristics:
(1) People using digital desktop tools to create designs for new products and prototype them (" digital DIY").
(2) A cultural norm to share those designs and collaborate with others in online communities.
(3) The use of common design file standards that allow anyone, if they desire, to send their designs to commercial manufacturing services to be produced in any number, just as easily as they can fabricate them on their desktop. This radically foreshortens the path from idea to entrepreneurship, just as the Web sis in software, information, and content.

p27 -
(1) How would these products be improved if they were connected to the Internet?
(2) How would they be improved if the designs were open, so anyone could modify or improve them?
(3) How much cheaper would they be if their manufacturers didnt charge for their intellectual property?

p74 -
We live in a "remix" culture ; everything is inspired by something that came before, and creativity is shown as much in the reinterpretation of existing works as in original ones...Just as Apple encouraged music fans to "Rip. Mix. Burn," Autodesk now preaches the gospel of "Rip. Mod. Fab" (#-D scan objects, modify them in a CAD program, and print them on a #-D printer)...You don't need to invent something from scratch or have an original idea. Instead, you can participate in a collaborative improvement of existing ideas or designs. The barrier to entry of participation is lower because it's so easy to modify digital files rather than create them entirely yourself.

p77 -
EXAMPLES of mass customization
the examples where consumers are designing their own products online are rarely mass. Threadless (T-shirts), Lu;u (self-published books), CafePress (Coffee mugs and other trinkets), are others like them are thriving businesses, but they are PLATFORMS for creativity more than great examples of mass customization.

p78 -
Blogger JASON KOTTKE wrestled wit what to call this new class of entrepreneurship, these cottage industries with global read targeting niche markets of distributed demand. "Boutique" is too pretentious, and "indie" not quite right. He observed that others had suggested "craftsman, artisan, bespoke, cloudless, studio, atelier, long tail, agile, bonsai company, mom and pop, small scale, specialty, anatomic, big heart, GTD business, dojo, haus, temple, coterie, and disco business" But none seems to capture the movement.
So he proposed "small batch", a term most often applied to bourbon. In this spirits world, this implies handcrafted care. But it can broadly refer to business focused more on the quality of their products than on the size of the market. They'd rather do something they were passionate about than go mass.


p108-
Today, inventors increasingly share their innovations publicly without any patent protection at all. This is what open source, Creative Commons, and all the other alternatives to traditional intellectual property protection do. Why do they do so? Because the creators believe they get back more in return than they give away: free help in developing their inventions. People tend to join promising open projects, and when those projects are shared, the contributions are automatically shared, too. Inventors also get feedback as well as help in promotion, marketing, and fixing bugs.

p112 -
In a sense, such rich, engaging content is marketing - marketing for the community itself, but also for the products that the community has created. Whether they think of it this way or not, the most successful Makers are also the best marketers. They're constantly blogging about their progress, and tweeting, too. They rake pictures and videos of every milestone, and post those. Their excitement in making is infectious, and builds excitement and anticipation for the products they ultimately release.

Seen this way, all making in public is marketing. Community management is marketing. Tutorial posts are marketing, Facebook updates are marketing. E-mailing other Makers in related fields is marketing. Of course, it's not JUST marketing: the reason that it's so effective is that it's also providing something of value that people appreciate and pay attention to...Above all, your community is your best marketing channel. Nor only is that the course for the word-of0mouth and viral marketing that you'll need, but it's also a safe place to talk about your won products, as enthusiastically as you want. If you've given people a reason to gather that serves their needs and interests, crowing about your cool new gizmo isn't advertising, it's content!


p116 - compete with china - lower price
And frankly, being able to read a lower-price market is a form of innovation, too, and that is no bad thing.
Personally, I'm delighted to see this development, for 4 reasons:
1. I think it's great that people have translated the wiki into Chinese, which makes it accessible to more people
2. It's a sign of success - you get cloned only if you're making something people want.
3. Competition is good.
4. What starts as clones may eventually become real innovation and improvements. Remember that our license requires that any derivative designs must be open-source. Think how great it would be if a Chinese team created a better design than ours. Then we could turn the tables and produce their design, translating the documentation into English and making them available to a market outside China. Everybody wins!

p 128- What makes these new models so powerful is that they tap the "dark energy" (or, as writer Clay Shirky calls it, "cognitive surplus"_ that's been all around us already. It's the ultimate market solution: open-innovation communities connect latent supply (talent not already employed in that field) with latent demand (products not already economical to create the usual way).

p139-
This was like the early days of computing. There were specialized computers for accounting, others for ballistic missile trajectories, and yet others for the census. Then researches invented the general-purpose computer, and today the PC on your desk can do anything Each program you run reconfigures the machine for a different function... Your computer can be a book, a phone, a television, a newspaper, a plaything, or a security guard, depending on what software it is running.



--

recommended 3-D drawing programs
Free: Google Sketchup, Autodesk 123D (windows), TinkerCAD (web)
paid: solidworks

recommended 3-D printing solutions
printers: makerBot Replicator, Ultimaker
Servies: shapeways, ponoko

recommended 3-D scanning solutions
software: free autodesk 123D catch
Hardware: MakerBot 3-D scanner (requires a webcam and a pico projector. Use the free Mashlab software to clean up the image

recommended laser-cutting solutions
service bureau: ponoko.com
software: autodesk123DMake

recommended CNC solutions:
hobby-sized (dremel tool): MyDIYCNC
semi-pro: ShopBot Desktop

recommended electronics gear
Starter kit: Adafruit budget Arduino kit
Soldering iron: Weller WES51 soldering station
Multimeter: Sparkfun digital multimeter

The Second Machine Age - Book capture

p 18 - "Our brains are extraordinarily good at taking in information via our senses and examining it for patterns, but we're quite bad at describing or figuring out HOW we're doing it, especially when a large volume of fast-changing information arrives at a rapid pace.
As the philosopher Michael Polanyi famously observed, "We know more than we can tell"



p21 - Siri

• Where is Elvis buried? Responded, "I cant answer that for you." It thought the person's name was Elvis Buried.
• When did the movie Cinderella come out? Responded, with a movie theatre search on Yelp.
• When is the next Halley's Comet? Responded, "You have no meetings matching Halley's."
• I want to go to Lake Superior. Responded with directions to the company Lake Superior X-Ray."

p28, 29 - ASIMO

"As the roboticist Hans Moravec has observed, "It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." 

The situation has come to be known as Moravec's paradox, nicely summarized by Wikipedia as"the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills requires enormous computational resources"

Moravec's insight is broadly accurate, and important. As the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker puts it, "The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard...As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

p 37- The digital progress we've seen recently is certainly impressive, but ti's just a small indication of what's to come. It's the dawn of the second machine age. To understand why it's unfolding now, we need to understand the nature of technological progress in the era of digital hardware, software,, and networks. In particular, we need to understand its three key characteristics: that is exponential, digital and combinatorial. 

p42 - The (second) reason that Moore's Law has held up so well for so long is what we might call 'brilliant tinkering' - finding engineering detours around the roadblocks thrown up by physics, When it became difficult to cram integrated circuits more tightly together, for example chip makers instead layered them on top of one another, opening up a great deal of new real estate... As Intel executive Mike Marberry puts it, "If you're only using the same technology, then in principle you run into limits. the truth is we've been modifying the technology every five or seven years for 40 years, and there's no end in sight for being able to do that" This constant modification has made Moore's Law the central phenomenon of the computer age

p62 - Waze (google maps)

Waze exploits two of the well-understood and unique economic properties of digital information: such information is non-rival, and it has close to zero marginal coset of reproduction. In everyday language, we might say that digital information is not "used up" when it gets used, and it is extremely cheap to make another copy of a digitized resources.

p91 - Our digital machines have escaped their narrow confines and started to demonstrate broad abilities in pattern  recognition, complex communication, and other domains that used to be exclusively human. (referencing to first paragraph)

p96 - Those of us who believe in the power of recombinant innovation believe that this development will boost human progress. We can't predict exactly what new insights, products, and solutions will arrive in the coming years, but we are fully confident that they'll be impressive. The second machine age will be characterized by countless instances of machine intelligence and billions of interconnected brains working together to better understand and improve our world.

p 107 - The Gross National Product does not include the beauty of our poetry or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes  life worthwhile" - Robert F. Kennedy

p115 - Research Erik Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh "The Attention Economy: Measuring the Value of Free Goods on the Internet".

They started with the observation that even when people don't pay with money, they still give up something valuable whenever they use their Internet: their time. No matter how rich or poor we are, each of us gets twenty-four hours in a day. In order to consumer YouTube, Facebook, or e-mail, we must 'pay' attention... (they) estimated that the Internet created about $2600 of value per user each year. None of this showed up in GDP statistics but if it had,  GDP growth - and thus productivity growth - would have been about 0.3 percent higher each year. 

p138 - Companies with the biggest IT investments typically made the biggest organizational changes, usually with a lag of five to seven years before seeing the full performance benefits. These companies had the biggest increase is the demand for skilled work relative to unskilled work. The lags reflected the time that it takes for managers and workers to figure our new ways to use the technology... Creativity and organizational redesign are crucial to investments in digital technologies. 

This means that the best way to use new technologies is usually not to make a literal substitution of a machine for each human worker, but to restructure the process... Compared to simply automating existing tasks, , this kind of organizational coinvention requires more creativity on the part of entrepreneurs, managers, and workers, and for that reason it tends to take time to implement the changes after the initial invention and introduction of new technologies. But once the changes are in place, they generate the lion's share of productivity improvements.

p178- technology replace workers

Eventually, the economy will find a new way equilibrium and full employment will be restored as entrepreneurs invent new businesses and the workforce adapts its human captial

BUT what if this process takes a decade? And what if, by then, technology has changed again?... Once one concedes that it takes time for workers and organizations to adjust to technical change, then it becomes apparent that accelerating technical change can lead to widening gaps and in creating possibilities for technological unemployment. Faster technological progress may ultimately bring greater wealth and longer lifespans, but it also requires fast er adjustments by both people are institutions

p 182- ... machines can have very different strengths and weaknesses than humans, When engineers work to amplify these differences, building on the areas where machines are strong and humans are weak, then the machines are more likely to complement humans rather than substitute for them. Effective productions is more likely to require both human and machine inputs, and the value of the human inputs will grow, not shrink, as the power of machines increases. 

A second lesson of economics and business strategy is that it's great to be a complement to something that's increasingly plentiful mMoreover, this approach is more likely to create opportunities to produce goods and services that could never have been created by unaugmented humans, or machines that simply mimicked people, for that matter. These new goods and services provide a path for productivity growth based on increased output rather than reduced inputs.

This in a very real sense, as long as there are unmet needs and wants in the word, unemployment is a loud warning that we simply aren't thinking hard enough about what needs doing. We aren't being creative enough about solving the problems we have using the freed-up time and energy of the people whose old jobs were automated away. We can do more to invent technologies and business models that augment and amplify the unique capabilities of humans to create new sources of value, instead of automating the ones that already exist... this is the real challenge facing our policy makers, our entrepreneurs, and each of us individually.

p 188 - "I have a children in school. How should i be helping them prepare for the future you're describing?" Sometimes the kids are in college, sometimes they're in kindergerten, but the question is the same. And it's not just parents who are concerned about career opportunities in the second machine age. Students themselves, leaders of the organizations that might hire them, educators, polucy makers and elected officials, and many others also wonder which human skills and abilities, if any, will still be valued as technology continues to improve. 

Frank Levy and Richard Murnane's excellent book The New Division of Labor was by far the best research and thinking on this topic... arguing that pattern recognition and complex communication were the two broad area where humans would continue to hold the high ground over digital labor... however, this has not always proved to be the case, so as technology races ahead, will it leave a generation behind in all areas, or at least most of them?

The answer is no. (cont)

p189 - Kasparov "the chess master and the computer"

Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process 

... we see that people still have a great deal to offer the game of chess at its highest levels once they're allowed to race with machines, instead of purely against them. 

p 191 - We've never seen a truly creative machine, or an entrepreneurial one, or an innovative one. We've seen software that could create lines of English text that rhymed, but none that could write a true poem ("the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility" as Wordsworth described it). Programs that can write clean prose are amazing achievement, but we've not yet seen one that can figure out what to write about next. We've also never seen software that could create good software; so far, attempts at this have been abject failures. 

These activities have on thing in common: IDEATION, or coming up with new ideas or concepts... good new ideas or concepts, since computers can easily be programmed to generate new combinations of preexisting elements like words. This however, is not recombinant innovation in any meaningful sense. It's close to the digital equivalent of a hypothetical room full of monkeys banging away randomly on typewriters for a billion years and still not reproducing a single play of Shakespeare's. 

p195 - Sugata Mitra 2013 TED

"I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from?.. It came from... the last and the biggest of the empire on this plant, [the British Empire].

What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made of people. It's still with us today. It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to product those people: the school. The schools would product the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine... They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read, and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.

p201 - Gate has said that he chose to go into software when he saw how cheap and ubiquitous computers, especially microcomputers, were becoming. Jeff Bezos systematically analyzed the bottlenecks and opportunities created by low-cost online commerce, particularly the ability to index large numbers of products, before he sets up Amazon. Today, the cognitive skills of college graduates - including not only science, technology, engineering, and math, the so-called STEM disciplines, but also humanities, arts and social sciences -  are often complements to low-cost data and cheap computer power. This helps them command a premium wage. 

p213 - But it's also important to recognize that hard-to-measure skills like creativity and unstructured problem solving are increasingly important as machines handle more routine work. MIT's Bengt Holmstrom and Stanford's Paul Milgrom did pioneering work showing that strong incentives for achieving measurable goals can crowd out hard-to measure-goals. 

p216 - We favor reducing unnecessary, redundant, and overly burdensome regulation, but recognize that this is likely to be slow and difficult work.

(1) regulators rarely like giving up authority once it's granted to them 

(2) those companies and industries protected by existing regulations will no doubt lobby strenuously to preserve their privileged positions

(3) separate sets of regulations exist at the federal, state, and municipal levels in America, so comprehensive change cannot be brought about by any single entity

... so prospective entrepreneurs can likely expect to face a continued patchwork of regulations in many areas. Still, we believe that it is important to try to reduce the regulatory burden and make the business environment as welcoming as possible for entrepreneurs

p 251- Our generation will likely have the good fortune to experience two of the most amazing events in history: the creation of true machine intelligence and the connection of all humans via a common digital network, transforming the planet's economics. Innovators, entrpreneurs, scientists, tinkerers, and many other types of geeks will take advantage of this cornucopia to build technologies that astonish us, delight us, and work for us.