Michel Bauwens at Lift Austria | Enable

I am in Vienna attending a Lift@home event organized by a local team of entrepreneurs and academics. Second talk of the day is Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives founder Michel Bauwens. John Thakara pointed in advance to this talk, he was right. Michel put some words on things “you don’t need a PHD to notice” but that, brought together in such a comprehensive way, connect into something powerful: a name for this movement most early adopters are feeling without being able to explain it further.

2 fundamentally wrong assumptions in our society:

- We think earth resources are infinite. But an infinite thinking within a finite system is wrong.
- We think we have to make cooperation difficult to make collaboration happen.

There is now a conscience that these assumptions need to change, and collaboration and openness are a key answer. Steps to make this happen:

1. identifying key aspects of openess (participation, transparency, “shareability”, access)

2. finding enablers of openness (a common language, assets, etc): definitions, code, licences, standards

3. infrastructures of openness: open meeting spaces, open territories (Regiowiki), open hardware (Arduino), open objects (eCars – Now), etc.

4. Practices of openness: open software (Linux), open designs (Honeybee Network), open knowledge

5. Domains of openness: education, science, business, government, spirituality (interesting to imaginea user generated religion…)

6. Products of openness: Open course ware, open books, open journals

7. Open movements: OpenMaterials, OpenCoalition

8. Open consciousness…

You can see Michel’s talk as a mind map here.

Visiting Yahoo’s Swiss office

Continuing the cool offices tradition created by tech companies:

Reduce to the max

I got an Xbox controller in my hand a few days ago, and was puzzled by the unlikely design. It is too big, some buttons are really hard to reach, they can not be pushed as quickly as they should, etc.

Part of what motivated Microsoft to design this was probably a will to differentiate their hardware from the previously released Playstation’s controller. Bad idea. Sometimes you should recognize that something can not be improved – or at least not with the ideas you have right now.

I was surprised when Sony kept the same design across versions of their Playstation controllers: the PS2 one had the same shape than the PS1, and the PS3 is basically the PS2 but wireless. With a new product automatically comes a new design? Not the controllers which remained the same, probably the most ergonomic gamepads ever design (not considering the Wii which is something different). Sony was smart to acknowledge they couldn’t do better, and therefore should not change for the sake of changing.

This reminds me of an old story when a few years ago Swissair collapsed. The national company was taken over by a small and local carrier that hired Tyler Brulé to design a new brand. Swiss was born with a logo made of a white cross inside a red square. Critics started to pile up: how can you pay that much money to come up with such an obvious brand?

Brulé’s thinking was right. Designing for the sake of it is wrong. Swiss best asset were its swissness, an image of quality, reliability, ponctuality. The Swiss flag is one of the most recognized symbol in the world. Going with something else than this would have been wrong.

That is where design is different from other domains. Sometimes doing less means doing better. See the minimalist packaging trend that has been spotted in Japan. Less can be more, or as the world’s best slogan put it back in 1997: “Reduce to the max“.

The new Lift Lab is here

Check the new website, introducing our rebirth with Fabien Girardin and Nicolas Nova! We offer a variety of services organized around 5 axis:

Understand
We explore how people behave and interact with technologies in their environment, and use these insights to design better experiences. We rely on field research methodologies that enable clients to better understand their users.

Assess
We assess innovation through product audits, reviews and testing and field as well as desk research. We then develop a detailed assessment of the project at hand based on our expertise and targeted needs. We finally suggest improvements and alternative solutions

Share
Acquiring the right knowledge is the first step towards change, followed by spreading the word. We give lectures and run workshops on technology, innovation, design and social change. We also use our conference experience to organize private and public events for our clients.

Foresee
We map possible future changes to highlight new opportunities and prepare for them. We use futures research and tools to map emerging social and technological shifts and prepare for them.

Create
We create instantiations of possible near future applications. Based on prototyping methods, we make product ideas or insights coming from field studies materialize.

We currently specialize in the following domains: web and internet, video games, mobile and location-based services, urban computing and robotics/networked objects.

More innovative web

Three weeks after finding Bestiario I’m again impressed by a site. Not super easy to browse (= not sure it achieves the informational part of its mission that well) but a very engaging user experience: Wonderwall.

A website with an innovative interface

Long time I hadn’t been impressed by a website, and Bestiario just slapped me with their cool interface. It’s the webpage that looks at you, not the opposite!

Feels like 1995 again, open your browser and find something unexpected and cool :)

Conference websites

Nice compilation of conferences and events websites made by Smashing Magazine:

That’s great inspiration for Lift‘s site relaunch planned for 2010.

How to recognize a good conference?

I get the question regularly: how to recognize bad conferences in advance? Let me offer a few hints, and hopefully save you from painful experiences.

• Speakers <> sponsors
  Conferences want you to know who is supporting them, and who will be speaking. Compare these two lists, and if you see too many similarities, start wondering if some people bought their time on stage, and will therefore need to recoup their investment by pitching you their stuff. Things are not black or white (if you have Google as a sponsor you should not cancel that speech from Sergei and Larry), but that simple check is a strong indication on how the organizers plan to use your attention.
• Program packing (and rhythm)
  Seven speakers on a forty minutes panel? The organizers are speaker-dropping you! They put as many people on stage as possible to maximize the chances of hooking you up. Problem is, the speakers will not have time to debate, just barely to present several slides under stress. Not very interesting. As a rule of thumb, count 15 to 20 minutes per speaker on a panel, i.e. a three speakers in one hour is ok, four is really the limit, above that it’s a non sense.
  On the other side, giving a speaker a one hour slot is extremely dangerous unless he is Steve Jobs or Gunter Pauli. Half of the room will fall asleep with no change of pace after thirty minutes.
• Who is coming?
  Fundamental rule of conferences: a great event is not measured by who is speaking but by who is attending (speakers included of course). Can you see a participants list, and browse profiles? Do you see a bunch of wannabees or interesting people? Thing you will spend three to four days in the same room with these people, if you already have any sort of apprehension here is an answer: don’t go.
• Is the conference for or non-profit?
  Davos, Poptech, TED, Lift, all good conferences (sorry for the self-promotion, at the same time I won’t tell you Lift sucks ;) are organized by not-for profit organizations. Why? Because not for profit institutions tend to be more independent, and because conferences are always happening under extremely intense financial constraints. The money that is not used to pay dividends is invested in the event, and it shows.
• Look out for interactions
  It’s very simple: an interactive conference is (very likely) one that had to integrate a good audience. Can the audience propose talks? Is there a way to ask questions or interact with the speakers before and after their talk? Can you see who is attending, and contact the other participants in advance?
• Are speakers physically attending (and for how long?)
  At a good conference, you will have a chance to meet the speakers as they are interested by the event itself, and will therefore stay. One of the magic of Davos is that their location is so remote you have to stay there. There is (rarely) such thing as someone showing up, giving his talk, and packing to go somewhere else.
  Don’t forget to also check if the speakers will talk on location or through video chat (a common trick is to “forget” to announce this tiny detail). Video is nice, but you lose all the intangibles, the body language, the prestance, and really the technologies currently available don’t work unless you pay millions. And that also means less chances for a coffee and a nice discussion during the break.
• What is the balance of power between the organizers and the speakers?
  This one is trickier to spot, but it is extremely important. The organizer of a conference is a curator, and needs to ensure the program is coherent, that the speakers don’t repeat what has been said in a previous presentation, that the slides are not written in 6 points high font, etc. The organizer needs to be able to negotiate with the speaker, and ask for adaptations of the content to the event’s constraints. Can they do that?
  A first time conference will have a hard time, and you will probably see speakers not well prepared, and giving talks they have used all over the planet before showing up. Try to see if the situation is more balanced, if the conference is established and respected enough that it can work with (and not “for”, nor “against”) the speakers to deliver good content.
• Price is misleading
  There is no correlation between the quality of a conference and it’s price. Some cheap conferences are extremely interesting, while very expensive ones can suck. As nothing is free in our world, a conference that won’t charge you at the door will have to find value somewhere. Will the organizers pitch themselves or their company? Are sponsors giving lengthy talks? Are the speakers a group of friends looking for media attention? Or is it really an act of love? The latter is quite rare, although not impossible. So look carefully at the program before you sign up.
  Paid conferences should be more independent and free of pitches, because by paying your ticket you relieve the organizers of some pressure, making them less dependent on sponsors. Check the program and the sponsors list, look at the website, try to feel if the focus is the conference brand (bad) or the content (good).
• Logistics are an indicator (but not everything)
  Logistics are again very misleading. You can be in a very nice conference center and only use one of the second tier room (especially frequent with hotel venues). At the same time, you will forget you had a crappy sandwich if Bill Gates shared it with you. Conferences are an experience, and many things influence the quality of the time you will spend. Four years down the road you remember who you met, not the menu of the lunch, so don’t base too much of your assessment on the logistics.

What is your experience? Can you share your tips on how to recognize a good conference?

Compensating for ideal design

Fascinating development around electric cars, devices that are so silent they become dangerous for pedestrians used to the noise of our good old explosion engines. Why not also add a fume spitting vapor at the back of the car?

Japan’s near-silent hybrid cars have been called dangerous by the vision-impaired and some users, prompting a government review on whether to add a noise-making device [...]

“Blind people depend on sounds when they walk, but there are no engine sounds from hybrid vehicles when running at low speed” and on the electric motor, he said.

Link

How bad design kills people

This article about the plane collision above the amazon reads like a novel, and details the “long, thin thread of acts and omissions [that] brought the two airplanes together”. The accident could have been avoided if the pilots of the smaller plane – the one who cut the left wing of a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people – had noticed a chain reaction: losing their transponder (some sort of identifier) took down the anti collision system. The warnings were “in view but unseen”.

At that moment, 4:02 p.m., the transponder quit. No chime sounded in the cockpit. Instead, a small warning silently appeared on each of the two Radio Management Units, showing an abbreviation for “Standby.” The understated warnings must have made good sense to Honeywell’s engineers, who inhabit offices in Arizona, but they were not helpful to the pilots far away in flight, who were drowning in their products. For the next 500 miles the “Standby” warnings remained in view but unseen [...]

with their attention again focused on the cockpit, the pilots still did not notice that the transponder was on Standby. Another warning they missed was a small sign saying tcas off, shown at the bottom of each pilot’s Primary Flight Display, the screens they would have referenced for basic flight control had the autopilot not by law been handling that chore. tcas stands for Traffic Collision Avoidance System. It is a nested safety device independent of Air Traffic Control that converses electronically with other airplanes in flight, and in the case of imminent collision alerts the pilots of both airplanes and negotiates a solution—typically instructing one crew to descend and the other to climb. It is required equipment in almost all airliners and jets, and is considered to be so reliable that its instructions supersede those of air-traffic controllers. It works, however, only between airplanes with active transponders. In the Legacy cockpit, therefore, the tcas necessarily dropped out when the transponder switched to Standby. Again, there were no warning chimes. But as a consequence the Legacy was now flying blind to the presence of other airplanes, and was itself invisible to their otherwise functional tcas displays.

Link

How small moments of inattention can become diabolic. Routine is a pilot’s worth enemy I guess.