But first, a movie interlude from High Fidelity:

In this scene, we see that the basic ways we would guess to organize a record collection are Chronological (by album release) or Alphabetical (artist or album?) …I would also guess genre. Genres are tough, because there is so much overlap (blues, blues-rock and bluegrass…I’m sure there are artists that span those)….and what’s amazing is that Autobiographical organization seems like such an innovative (and hard!) way to organize information….but it’s still time. It’s just *personal* time, instead of absolute time. Which is awesome.

Enter Mr. Saul Wurman, who coined the term “LATCH” and “the five hat racks” in his book ‘Information Anxiety’ (1989). He claims that there exactly 5 ways to organize information and the acronym “LATCH” helps you remember them: Location, Alphabet, Time,Category, and by Hierarchy. But we see from High Fidelity we can see that even just time, which seems straightforward, can have nuances.

Also, as the second video points out, combining or overlaying multiple types of information organization can create amazing results. Working with teams to create organic or relatable categories is an important process…we each may have our own ways of looking at and “chunking” the data. Sharing and agreeing on the right categories can be an involved process. The same is true of Hierarchies. Size, cost and Complexity can be easy to agree on. But how to we organize objects from most important to least important? Importance, or value as separate from cost are fuzzy terms…parsing that out can have a big impact.

First, there was the personal constraints:

They quickly realized that Cosby, and by extension Dr. Huxtable, couldn’t really be at ease wearing a suit around the house. “Bill basically likes to be comfortable, and in his real life, he’s in his sweats or his PJs,” says Lemire.

Avoiding straitlaced, white-collar attire also made Dr. Huxtable a more dynamic character. “I wanted to get away from the white coat all the time,” says Cosby, “or the blue blazer look, with the khaki pants and the penny loafers.” In contrast, Dr. Huxtable’s sweaters infused the show with a contagious, creative energy.

Then there were technical constraints:

The available camera technology meant that certain patterns and textures had to be carefully avoided. “The show was shot with multi-cameras,” says Lemire, “and back then they had a lot of problems with strobing, so it was very difficult to use certain patterns.” The stockinette stitch, a standard on most sweaters, alternates rows of knitted and purled stitches, which results in a subtle ribbing or stripe effect. The cameras used for “The Cosby Show” made even solid-colored stockinette sweaters vibrate or strobe when onscreen.

And then, more technical constraints:

…the show often relied on close-up shots of Cosby to capture such moments of improvised humor. However, tight shots like these caused problems when matching the scenes from two different takes, as a slight difference in costume positioning would become a glaring mistake.

“Usually you don’t do close-ups on TV, and that’s why we started using sweaters,” says Lemire. “As our bodies move around, the clothes are going to shift between the first and second take. If you have a jacket on, and the shirt collar’s in one spot, it’s going to slide off a little on one side or the other, or it might do something else that didn’t match. Sandrich was a real stickler for things matching, so we just did the sweater thing. I actually sewed his shirts to the sweaters so that nothing moved.”

Really, it made me think of my favorite Eames video. Then again, many things do:

What’s important and awesome about this video is that Eames is awesome. And Funny. Many of his answers are simply “No” or “I wouldn’t” (insert laughing!)

Listen in, about three minutes, when he is asked about constraints.

Q: “Does the creation of Design admit constraint?”

A: “Design depends largely on constraints.”

Q: “What constraints?”

A: “The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.”

Q: “Does Design obey laws?”

A: “Aren’t constraints enough?”

Constraints are what I would call Step Zero of Doing Design. Eames said that the mark of a designer is their willingness to accept constraints, and to design with them. The producers of the Cosby Show had a lot of constraints to deal with…but instead of working against them, they worked with them, and created a memorable impression on us all!

While I missed her talk at SXSW, I found an older talk by Ruth Suehle where she talks about the values of Open Source. This led me to the awesome interview of Opensouce.com’s CEO Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a general badass. You can watch him on the Daily Show talk about his book and be awesome.

His interview and Ruth’s talk covered a few principles. You’ll find that they apply not just to innovation but to life in general.

1.Community

When you make something more open, you can invite people in…and you get more ideas…not just your own. That’s why I love thinking on walls. Open source communities and projects  like Wikipedia and linux have created tremendous resources for the entire world to share. One person could not have created these resources all on their own. It’s only by inviting people to join in, and make it their own that we can inspire such productivity.

2.Sharing

It seems like every time I turn around, I hear about another company trying to make an internal knowledge sharing platform, to leverage past work and create internal efficiencies. Tools like Wikis and Yammer can help make it easier to ask around your community and share knowledge openly. Suehle uses the Open High School of Utah as an example of what happens when you make it easy for teachers to share lesson plans and insights quickly and easily. Teachers can modify, adapt and use each other’s ideas freely, fueling improvisation and innovation.

3.Meritocracy

The best ideas should win. Plain and simple!  It’s not about politics, it’s about the truth. Shelton had a great (if somewhat circular) thought on this: "You tell people the truth. You’re candid… That’s what’s great about open source, because that’s what we’re all about,".

4.Rapid prototyping

Open Source means you can take works from around you and pull them together however you can. You don’t wait for perfect…As Bre Pettis said, Perfection is the enemy of Done.

Shelton had a nice thought on that, too: "In the military you work within an acquisition and procurement system that’s bureaucratic and slow," said Shelton. "The average time from conceptual idea to the time it’s in the hands of the troops is about seven years." While the military was once great at innovating, they now try to take advantage of existing innovation. It’s faster and sometimes cheaper go out and select commercial, off-the-shelf capabilities that deal with the current threat and modify them as needed.

5.Transparency

Admit your mistakes. When people pitch an idea, it’s important to talk about what works and what doesn’t. Focusing only on the positive is unbalanced.

Shortly after becoming Commander of the joint Chiefs, Shelton dug into rumors about a lack readiness in various branches of the military. The numbers were embarrassing, and the chiefs advised him to not make the request to the president, to protect his legacy. Shelton stood firm. "I’d rather be known as an individual who tried and failed rather than one who met the low standards I set for myself,"

I think the flip side of transparency is comfort with failure – and knowing that failing early, cheaply and often is the best way to learn.

As you can tell, I’m excited about Open Innovation. I think it’s more productive and more transformative than closed Innovation. How can you open the doors on your next project and let the world in?

And as always, I’m honored to get to represent Gothamsmith on such a stage as SXSW. And many thanks go to Liz Bacelar of Decoded Fashion, who put this whole opportunity together.

3D was the buzzword of the week, amazingly, garnering us some sweet coverage in the Austin Chronicle! The reporter really got what we love about 3D printing and the Gothamsmith project:

"I like the Renegade Craft Fair, but I can’t really wear cute dresses that often," laments Daniel Stillman, who represents the more manly side of 3-D-printed fashion on the panel. His company, GothamSmith, started with four computer-savvy friends lamenting the shortage of cool, affordable, heirloom-quality men’s accessories. Now they design 3-D-printed cufflinks and pendants shaped like bicycle gears, anvils, and headphones. GothamSmith’s designs actually harness the limitations of 3-D printing to create a handmade look.

So, yeah. More of that!

This great video from Second Road talks about what I see as Strategy…not a series of Gant charts and action steps, but powerful storytelling. He says “The future gets shaped by the power of argument” and that these arguments can create a “community of action, based on belief.”

Which is why I wanted the 5th phase of design taught at the Design gym to be a Storytelling phase (we call it Distill). You have to do the groundwork, but without a powerful story, nothing gets done…no one believes.

And of course, Get storied really sparked my thinking on all of this, ages ago. If you haven’t checked them out, do so. Michael really brings home the power of story.

“Why go through the hassle of actually designing and making better products and services, and offering steadily more value to customers and society, when the firm could simply position its business so that structural barriers ensured endless above-average profits?”

That is strategy without design and humanity. Read more here, about how soul-free strategy at the Monitor group didn’t supply the lasting competitive advantage they promised to their clients.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what strategy means. My dear friend Carl Collins mentioned the ideas of Leverage and Inertia to me the other day, in the context of one’s ability to enact change or “move the needle”. I like to think of it as Making a Dent in the Universe. As a reformed physicist, my pulse quickened. Inertia in companies is something that has troubled me for a long time…even before I went to design school. To me, inertia is the problem of organizational change. The middle or the bottom or the top wants to change course, but the other parts (often the top, middle or bottom) don’t. This happens in religious organizations all the time (listen to this great This American Life episode about Heretics for more on that angle…where the top wants to change and the bottom doesn’t). I’ve seen giant multinationals pay good money to the consultancies I’ve worked for, to solve problems or offer solutions, that, when received, were disregarded or shelved. Sometimes it’s politics…we were simply talking to the wrong people. They wanted change, but another division of the company wanted another type of change, or no change at all. So we wonder…was it us? Did we not sell it right? Or were we not talking to the right people? Or is the organization not even capable of change? Was it lack of leverage, or was it inertia?

I could have the best damn ideas for where a company should get to, based on where it is and where it wants to go. But if the stakeholders I’m engaged with don’t have the juice, the power, the leverage to enact that change, I’m just providing fodder for internal politics. My story might be a transformational one, it might help  move the dial on the issues…but the change may be slow to come.

What is Leverage? I think it’s a funny thing…you need three things – A big stick, a solid place to lever from, and some power. Archimedes is generally quoted as saying “give me a place to stand and a rod long enough, and I shall move the world!”…he should have mentioned the rod being strong enough, too. Leverage has this unique dual aspect – you need solid contact, but also some distance from the problem. If you’re too close to the problem, you can’t have leverage.

In a way, the further you are from the problem, the more leverage you can have. I think we have all had the experience of being in the weeds. When you’re down in it, it can be hard to see a solution, and it can be hard to effect change. But if you never get down into the weeds, you’ll never understand the problem. So I like the diagram at the top of this post – there’s some distance, but there’s also a solid connection.

This lovely diagram from Undercurrent lays out a nice vision of Strategy:

But the question – Where do you want to end up? – is one that a consultant sometimes has to answer. As a designer, we often hear the problem and think “I know just the thing!” and often, we are right. In fact, companies come to us because we’re creative and think differently than they do. If they could solve the problem with their existing tools, they would have already. Even so, they are not always prepared to hear what we think is the “right way" to go, especially if it is harder, bigger or stranger than what their current business model encapsulates.

Strategy involves a skill that I’m only just now beginning to hone – asking questions. Drawing the goal and the vision out of the client, not inserting a solution from my brain. It’s turning the equation on it’s head. I’m not the expert; The client is the expert. My new friend Alex Cheek has been burning my brain about the work he does at second road, where they focus on using language and dialogue to create the clarity within companies to forge a clearer sense of “where you want to end up".

So that gets me back the idea of facilitation, which has been brewing strongly in my mind ever since I co-founded the design gym last year. Facilitation is the art of creating the space for those questions to be asked, for the real constraints to be uncovered, for creating alignment with the stakeholders. It’s my current theory that if you get the right people into the room, and have the right conversation, you can generate the leverage and the momentum to move the dial on the problem…to make a difference. Which is why we get out of bed in the morning.

“If a project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and exact schedule at the beginning…And if you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.”

I dug up this old clip I had in Evernote today…and it’s a blockbuster. It’s from the obituary of Joseph Gavin who died in November, 2010. He managed the 7,500-member team that made the Eagle, the lunar module that landed on the moon’s surface on July 20, 1969.

The obituary went on to say:

Preparations for the moon landing were inherently uncertain. Imagined possibilities included a layer of dust more than 30 feet thick, a slippery surface like ice, and potholes.

“So we developed a computer program, based on tests of a quarter-scale model of the lunar module, and we ran the program through some 400 different landing conditions,” Mr. Gavin said in an interview with Technology Review, published by M.I.T., in 1994.

From an original estimate of $350 million, the module’s cost rose to $1.5 billion.

That’s a big change in cost…and a fixed scope: Get a man to the moon and bring him back. And it went through because of unshakable motivation. I hope that we can still find that kind of motivation today, without war or national pride as the sole drivers! Read the whole obituary here.

Some great points I’d like to highlight:

The people connecting groups are not special. Yeah…sad, but true. But not in a bad way. More like, we’re all special. Each of us is at the center of a web of groups. There are people in those groups who are close to us, and those not so close to us…and each of them is at the center of their own web of connections. It seems obvious, but it bears repeating.

He goes on to say that the “tipping point” view of influence is not right (pictured above the web diagram). Firstly, influencers can’t influence people who aren’t influencable.  Some people have a high threshold of influence. See below for another hilariously obvious but essential diagram.

The web of connections is the key to influence…we are much, much more likely to take the advice of our close friends over the advice of celebrities. He goes on to point out that Facebook average interactions are surprisingly low…4 people interacted within a week. Average group sizes of 8. These numbers are amazingly close to numbers arrived at via theories and studies of human interactions. The average number of friends, for example, is 130-170…which is basically Dunbar’s Number. 

Paul also points out that we share feelings, not facts. It’s a great point and he shows it with a chart of what articles people view versus what they share. We read the news about Libya, but we share gossip, intrigue and helpful articles.

So his final conclusion is that social needs to be baked into experiences, not bolted on. It’s the difference between having a “share” button at the bottom of an item, versus knowing where in the concert hall your friends are sitting. Which really motivates you to buy a ticket? In the end, this is about selling things, true. But it is wrapped up in a larger mission to build business around people. He points out several times that technology is changing a lot faster than people. We *have* to interact with more that 150 people regularly…and technology can help us cope with the limits of our memory and experience. There is too much information to sort through, and unless we work intelligently with the limits of our own intelligence, we’re bound to be overwhelmed.

There are three main avenues that I think Myanmar should invest in, all of which are deeply broken or nonexistent: digital infrastructure, design infrastructure, and collaborative wealth building. Digital infrastructure will support connections among the people at large. Design infrastructure should help cultivate the Myanmar creative class, and collaborative wealth building will ensure that there are strong connections between the creative class and the larger populace.

One Yangon native, Ozz, who recently moved back to Myanmar restart his family’s construction business, said that just a few years ago, government censorship of the Internet was so harsh, that it would take up to three days for his emails to be received…worse than a letter! He simply stopped using the internet to communicate. The internet had lost his trust. My own experience was of agonizingly slow connections and sparse wifi. To help their growing economy, Myanmar should emulate cities like Bangkok and New York, and provide free wifi. The populace already has a surprising number of phones and tablets that are Internet ready. The urge to connect will move to overpower the mistrust that many have for the government…once it is in place, people will use the network without hesitation. Insuring both ubiquity and speed will have a powerful force on Myanmar commerce and lifestyle in the most cost-effective way I can imagine – more than building roads or subways. It would have a second benefit – burnishing the Myanmar brand. It would mean that the government isn’t afraid of freedom, and would distance their image from their totalitarian past. A challenge to this effort is the irregularity of the power supply in much of Myanmar. Waiting for a perfect power supply would be a mistake; people want to be connected now.

In Bangkok, the prime minister has funded the Thailand Creative and Design Center (TCDC) where people can learn about materials, culture, the history of design, and consult with designers on product concepts. The space is dramatic and full of digital access and provides a space for creatives of all types to interact and exchange ideas. I met a photographer from Italy and a Thai designer who studied at my grad school in Brooklyn within 30 minutes of arriving. Creating digital avenues is essential, but creating physical spaces where the populace can learn about design and technology, and where the creative class can share their knowledge with each other and the larger community is essential. Over 1.5 million people visited the TCDC in 2011, an impressive impact. An MCDC in Myanmar’s capital would be an amazing step towards creating growth.

As the country develops and money continues streaming in from tourists dollars and outside investment, how can they make sure that the whole country benefits? In speaking with Zaw, a Myanmar native…who spends half of his time in Astoria, queens, and who just opened a restaurant in Bagan, sharing the wealth is not a Burmese cultural value right now. He decided that the service fee his restaurant charges will be shared by his employees, as a reward for their participation in the success of the restaurant…a very straightforward western concept. His business partners see the service charge monies pile up, and ask: why can’t they just pay the employees a flat rate, and pocket the profits? On the flip side, some natives tend to work as hard as is necessary, and no more – as there has never been much reward in that. How can we get a people to connect to capitalism and collaboration at the same time? A Myanmar-catered crowd funding system, combining kickstarter with a kiva-like system, with investment return. Allowing people to take small investments and see growth in return would be an extraordinary step to creating a capitalistic sprit, while fostering a collaborative value system and a goal of shared wealth.

Myanmar is growing fast…they are planning to build 10 cement plants in the next 2 years, to support the immense pent-up demand for growth in the country. With some of these efforts, my hope is that Myanmar can grow, not just in wealth, but shared prosperity.

It's amazing to see how such a simple object marshalls so much materials, skill and time.

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