A recent study conducted by Deloitte on more than 100 businesses with online communities reported by Josh Catone deals why these platforms often fail or don’t meet the expectations:

• “Businesses are being enticed by fancy technology. Mesmerized by bells and whistles, many business are foolishly blowing their entire budgets on technology
• Lack of proper management. The Deloitte study found that 30% of online communities have just part-time employees in charge, and most have just a single PR person running the show. (…) Managed communities are a lot less likely to grow organically the way general mainstream social networks do, so you need someone who knows how to build one in charge.
• The wrong measurement metrics. Moran noticed that most businesses are measuring the success of their communities in the wrong way. Though their stated goals are usually to create viral, word-of-mouth marketing and increase brand loyalty, the metric they use to gauge success is unique visitors. If all you’re after is growing visits to the site, then you’re missing the point. You’re not trying to compete with mainstream social networks, so you don’t need to chase eyeballs. Rather you need to build interaction and create a level of comfort”

Why do I blog this? not really a surprise IMO but since I am documenting failures for a project, I add this to my list of common problems. There would also be a lot to draw about the over-expectations that concerns 3D.

“Technological Landscapes” by Richard Rogers is an essay about “relevant past futures”, i.e the “past roads not taken”, in which he invites us to re-read the history of technological culture “to inform the selection of the technological landscapes of our day”:

“Historical comparison with imagery of previous technological landscapes fires the imagination. It is also the stuff of argument and defence for an idea or a project
(…)
The rationale to looking closely into the early history of current dominant systems relates (…) to challenging the commonplace idea that the marketplace sorts out the ‘best’ technology and that the consumer and society are the beneficiaries. (…) the ‘alternatives paths’ or ‘roads not taken’ historians examine the effects on society (and increasingly the environment) of having lost a potentially viable system - technology opportunity cost.

After mentioning some examples such as FM radio, Rogers goes on with:

“When new and ‘better’ technological systems are trumpeted, it is worth recalling these and other specific examples of lost battles, from the level of abstractions of craft versus mass production down to that of keyboard layout. In confronting better technologies of the future, the question always remains ‘better for whom’?“

And then some more elaborate thoughts about how past futures are used or can be relevant:

“The Nineties [case for space exploration] also shows us how earlier models (relevant pasts) are employed as ‘guides’ to make current futuristic cases more compelling. To make a case for a futuristic technological project, the promoter often must finds ‘usable pasts’ or indeed ‘usable past futures’.
(…)
We learn the past futures for at least two reason. They aid us in thinking through the ideals, principles and social relations which have been and could be reflected in and designed into our technologies, bringing within our grasp the ability to ‘imagine alternative technological designs’ and act accordingly. Secondly, comparison is the stuff of case building. Drawing the right parallel (or spotting the spurious analogy) is one step in proposing or opposing particular cases to be made for new technology and new forms of decision-making on technology.“

Why do I blog this? collecting material for a project about technological failures. I am interested in the role of failures in foresight and design. Rogers describes some pertinent ideas about how failed futures can frame design, and the intrinsically political imaginary realm of this practice.

Still gathering stuff about “failed futures” for a project, I ran across this interview of Matt Jones by Adaptive Path peeps that is very insightful. Some excerpts I found relevant for my project:

“RF: You’ve mentioned the danger of “lost futures,” based on the success of a given device. One model becomes wildly popular, and other, more interesting ways of looking at the problem get cast aside… or at least ignored when they could be doing the most good.

MJ: Exactly - the gravity well of the iPhone is going to be hard for anyone developing innovative UIs to escape for the next few years. In hardware, you’re subject to the determinism of sourcing components.

RF: Our friends the cognitive anthropologists have warned us about the implications of subscribing to the wrong cognitive artifacts…

MJ: So everyone for the last 2/3 years has been offered the same touchscreen components more or less by a few suppliers. And we all (more or less) have similar dimensions we can work within in a touch UI.

RF: So thinking in hardware becomes even more constrained?

MJ: To an extent. UIs will not be so diverse in the next few years… inside a BigDeviceCo you’re going to find it hard to justify the investment in the out-there stuff (as always). But there’s still innovation a plenty to come, its just that for the next few years it’ll be all 16:9 touchscreens, I guess. And then… hopefully someone will Wii on their parade and breakthrough with something as different as the iPhone was to the existing crop of smartphones. That’s my hope anyway. And I think it might be in the area of physical/gestural interfaces, matched with ambient/visualisation tech to give us more natural ‘Everyware‘.“

Why do I blog this? I am trying to collect material about what Jones calls “lost future” (in design+foresight), I quite like his stance here, not only about the example discussed (that 16:9 touchscreen device coming from Cupertino) but, rather, its possible consequence: how it eclipses other innovation. There are different consequences of failed futures, some are about traps like in this examples; others are about perpetuation of wrong ideas.

Back during the first internet bubble, mobile computing was already a hot thing and people start having ideas about how to connect things and people. One of them was Skim which enabled a sort of physical to digital connection through a identification number written a piece of clothes that you can text or email. To some extent, it’s about sending a note to your I.D. number that will be forwarded to your skim.com e-mail address. Your t-shirt could tell others how to get in touch with you BUT they won’t know you’re real identity.

The whole process is summarized here:

“There is a “unique mailbox number” on every fashion piece. It is six figures long. On the T-shirts it is on the sleeve, on the jackets it is on the pocket etc.
In the packaging of the product there is a card with an “access code” on it.
Together the “unique mailbox number” and the “access code” give you access to the world of skim.com.
Your skim.com mail account is now “unique mailbox number”@skim.com. This is yours forever. It is private to you. See our privacy promise.
You can give the email out to your friends, collegues, dates etc. To help you, some of our products come with business cards with your special number on it.
To check your mail, simply log on to the skim.com website, and go to the communications section. Then it is simple: enter your “unique mailbox number” and your “access code” and you can check/send mail.“

Why do I blog this? looking for service failures for my “tech failure” project. This skim.com thing is interesting in itself but obviously failed for some reasons (I’d be glad to know more about them). I guess the project was also an enabler of social comparison (”you have it, you’re part of that community”)

It’s also important to note the perpetuation of such ideas since reactee is a create-your-own-tshirt platform that also allows to display a code on the tshirt (to txt the person who wears it).

Thanks Luc!

The twelfth episode of The Simpsons’ fourth season, called Marge vs. the Monorail is maybe one of my favorite episode and is definitely a great lesson in design. And this, not only in the conception of public transport, but also in terms of innovation as a whole.

This episode focuses around the town of Springfield buying a monorail from a Lyle Lanley after earning lot of money, and instead of fixing more urgent problems like cracks on the streets. Only Marge seems to dislike the purchase but everyone in town seems to succumb to the glossy value of the Monorail. After a quick training, Homer happens to be the monorail driver. At first things run okay, but then some malfunction occur and the monorail accelerates dangerously. It’s eventually stopped by Homer who launched an anchor on a big donut.

What does that say about design/innovation?

First, it’s an interesting example of how a group of people puts lots of money in some sort of crazy things utterly cool that is not the most necessarily need of a community. When Marge tells Bart “Main Street’s still all cracked and broken“, he replies with the wisdom of the crowd motto: “Sorry, mom, the mob has spoken… Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!“. As if the street, as a means of mobility, was boring, old-fashion and useless compared to the shiny representation of the future depicted by the monorail. What’s funny is that even Lisa is fooled by the salesman when she tells him that such a transportation system would be useless in a low-density town such as Springfield. The promise of the value of a futuristic device such as the monorail is almost unquestionable (ah… progress), based on the common sense of the group.

Second, and surely a corollary, it also shows (and criticizes) how social pressure is important in the diffusion and acceptability of an innovation. “Ah it’s not for you, it’s more of a shelbyville idea” or”I’ve sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum, it put them on the map!” says the salesman showing a map of the US with only these cities on the map. To some extent, it follows innovation researcher from the 19th century Gabriel Tarde’s laws of imitation: innovation are adopted faster when they have already been accepted elsewhere.

Why do I blog this? preparing material for a course, looking for interesting examples of failures. Reminds me of some innovations-who-became fads right? Of course every fad are not always comparable to the “springfield monorail” (scholars would say “isomorphic”) but there are some good points in that episode.

People interested in the diffusion of innovation can find perfect exemplifications here:

• The monorail as the invention
• Springfield’s inhabitants as the social structure. As usual when they have to decide municipal decisions, they gather in the townhall, under the guidance of Joe Quimby (the mayor), showing a very swiss landsgemeinde way of making decisions. Innovation researchers who employ the term “authority-collective decision” to describe how this choice to buy and build a monorail is made.
• Lyle Lanley, the salesman, as the change agent external to the system
• Lisa and then Marge as people who are part of the social system but who have doubts.
• The monorail value proposition is the one of an innovation: faster than other means of transport, more sexy, complex and launched with the help of a VIP: Leonard Nemoy from Star Trek.

Of course, it does not depict the whole innovation diffusion, only the recurring failure of the monorail (based on different iterations) and how the salesmen made money out of it.

11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft by Colin Stewart is a very interesting discussion. I don’t agree with all of them but some are important.

That one struck me as relevant:

“6. THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT FAILURES
“One of the mantras that a large software development company uses is ‘Fail Often, Fail Fast,’ ” Wartenberg said.
“As Alan Mullaly said when he led Boeing Commercial Aircraft, ‘We celebrate mistakes; bring them into the open, because we can’t help fix what we don’t know about.’ ”
To show Blizzard’s devotion to this principle, CEO Morhaime and other executives listed the titles of canceled games Blizzard had worked on: Nomad, Raiko, Warcraft Adventures, Games People Play, Crixa, Shattered Nations, Pax Imperia, and Denizen.
“We don’t have a 100 percent hit rate. We just cancel all the ones that aren’t going well,” Morhaime said.
“Failure begets success,” intellectual property attorney St. George said. “Many successful companies and CEOs have noted that their best successes have come from failures. The lessons learned from failures will provide the stepping stones for the next innovation.”“

Why do I blog this? gathering notes about failures for a personal project. It’s also interesting to see that game companies are only reaching the stage where they figure out the lessons described in that paper (”GO BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD“, “MAKE CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENTS“).

Being interested in technological failures, I read “Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived” by Daniel H. Wilson. Some excerpts that I found interesting, related to causes of failures:

“Jetpack: “the development of the jetpack effectively ceased the day Wendell Moore passed away, and there are plenty of reasons why. As it turns out, the government frowns on the notion of everyday people equipped with jetpacks and the ensuing midair collisions, air range, and transformation of drunk drivers into inebriated human torpedoes. Worse yet, jeptacks are nearly useless in military applications - a soldier strapped to a jetpack is a sitting duck”

Moving sidewalk: “a few litigious pedestrians have spoiled it for the rest of us with their skull-cracking falls and attendant lawsuits”

Self-steering cars: “Obstacles abound, but without a broader understanding of the world, a robot car cannot tell the difference between a harmless clump of grass and a farmers’ market. Negative obstacles, such as holes in the ground, are particularly difficult for robot cars to identify. Navigation is also more difficult in cities, where tall buildings and bridges can block crucial GPS signals and soft, delicate targets (called pedestrians) abound.”

Flying car: “Merely providing the vehicles is not enough, however; if everyday people are to use them, scientists must know how to track thousands of these car-planes. And knowing is half of the battle. Collision-deterring navigation systems are key to transforming highways into skyways. Regular people just can’t be trusted”

Hoverboard: “They may be perfect for cruising over flat surfaces like water, ice, or a well-manicured lawn. but they are dangerously inept on city streets”.

Why do I blog this? currently collecting material about technological failures and failed (micro-)visions of the future for a project.

Among my readings during Easter was this “Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design” by Henry Petroski. The whole book is about design as a compromise in response to constraints, illustrated by stories concerning automobile cup holders, duct tape, WD-40, paper cups/bags and the devices to make them, the invention of single-lever faucets, the redesign of vegetable peelers and printers. It reads a bit like a Stephen Jay-Gould book in the sense that it’s highly descriptive with lots of details. Some chapters are a bit less insightful than others (the one about buying a house was a bit less interesting). And Petroski is an engineer, which gives him a certain perspective of the world.

The conclusion was certainly the part that interested me most, about silos/disciplines:

“Designing and building a piece of technology is more than an application of science. In fact, relying on science alone would make it virtually impossible to design even a modest bridge. What science would be applied? The laws of mechanics tell us that forces must balance if the bridge is to stand. But what forces, and stand how? Unless inventors and engineers, designers all, can first visualize some specific kind of bridge in their mind’s eye, they have nothing to which to apply the laws of science. The creation of a bridge or any other artifact requires, before anything else something imagined. Whether or not science can be applied to that mental construct is a matter of availability. It there is a body of scientific knowledge that can be applied, then it would be foolish not to exploit it.
(…)
In fact, “Science finds - Industry Applies - Man Conforms” will never be more than a catchy motto. The reality is “People Design - Industry Makes - Science Describes.” It is the creative urge that drives the human endeavor of design, which leads to inventions, gadgets, machines, structures, systems, theories, technologies, and sciences. Both science and technology are themselves artifacts of human thought and effort.“

And the last bit about failures:

“Simply put, all technology is imperfect as its creators, and we can expect that it will always be. As we can, by practice and discipline, improve our own behavior, so we can, by experience and process improve the behavior of our creations.
(…)
As this book has suggested, there are countless examples of technology’s imperfections and limitations, from the simplest of the most complex of made things. By understanding their flaws and the limitations of the design process that created them, we can better appreciate why they are and must be imperfect. All things designed and made have to conform to constraints, have had to involve choice among competing constraints, and thus have had to involve compromise among the choices. By understanding this about the nature of design, we can better negotiate the variety of stairways that we encounter, no matter how idiosyncratic or metaphorical, taking us from one level of technology to another.“

Why do I blog this? Being currently interested in “failure, possibly for a book/short piece, I am gathering sources like this. What did I learn here? all the evidences gathered in this book are meant to illustrate that “design failures” are not caused by human errors but are a side-effect of the need to make compromise between needs and constraints.

Wired reports on this intriguing modified Nintendo DS called “Disney Magic Connection” that offers location-based services (navigation, where to find what…). But it seems that it was not so much of a success.

Interestingly, Jim Hill describes what went wrong:

“The problem wasn’t with the technology. From what I hear, aside from a few minor GPS & battery-related issues, the “Disney Magic Connection” units worked great.
(…)
the Imagineers had originally hoped that they’d be able to recruit upwards of 60 families to take part in each day’s field test. But on most days, WDI had to settle for less than half that number. Mostly because cast members had such a tough time convincing families to come try “Disney Magic Connection.” (…) ost people have already invested an hour of their precious vacation time just in getting to the entrance of the Magic Kingdom. And to finally make it through the turnstiles and really be looking forward to that first ride … And then have some clown with a clipboard accost you, asking you if you’d be interested in taking part in some pilot program, was more than most parents with small children could bear at that moment.
(…)
Another aspect of the “Disney Magic Connection” field test that allegedly turned off a lot of would-be participants was the security deposit. You see, before these folks could actually get their hands on that DS, they were asked for a credit card. Which Mickey then took an imprint of. So that — in the event that these Magic Kingdom visitors accidentally left the theme park without first returning their test unit — Mouse House officials could then charge them $300 for the missing device.
(…)
Another cost-effective aspect of the “Disney Magic Connection” project is that these handheld units actually make use of the 400+ sensors that were put in place in this theme park back in 2004 for the “Pal Mickey” project. Of course, because there were areas in the Magic Kingdom where WDI deliberately didn’t put sensors (So that this interactive plush then wouldn’t speak up and ruin the show for all of the other guests) … The Imagineers had to install hundreds of additional sensors so that these Nintendo DS units would then tell the guests where they were.
(…)
And — yes — I did say “rent.” As of right now, the Walt Disney Company has no plans to sell these handheld units. Nor will you be able to bring your own Nintendo DS into the park from home and then tap into Disney’s wireless network.“

Why do I blog this? because it’s a marvellous story of a technological failure. The service looks okay, the technology’s there but there are lots of user and contextual issues that lead to this situation. Even the platform (Nintendo DS) is interesting but there’s always more hidden below the technological/interface’s structure.