The New York Times has published this interactive map portraying homicides around the city from 2003 through 2009. Being interactive, you can click on the locations and get some information detailing the crime. This map got me thinking about what this kind of medium provokes and how does it change our notion of journalism, news media, and the way we see ourselves and our city. I also thought about what the role of the interaction designer could be in this, digitally intensive, approach to journalism?
Personally, I find that this is a really valuable *example* of the way that large journalism organizations can transform themselves and once again become the providers of information that the public is not necessarily aware of - but I would like to see information about how many 'non-incidents' that police responded to or how many times the police responded to incidents where they saved a life (regardless of the incident). Maybe just a map showing how much reporting that the police department (or any other agency) actually has to report and how well they do it. I want more information about my city, and this map makes it clear that there is more information to be had, but if news journalism organizations are going to get into the visualization game then they've got to appreciate that visualization reporting is fundamentally different from written and spoken reporting that pushes information into a relatively tiny channel so that it can be digested.
My concern is that Information visualization is too powerful to limit to 'the most hard-hitting' and it seems that news organizations still don't get this. If they only provide one graphic visualization about murder - the way we look at our city might change - and not for the better. Its fairly obvious that some (perhaps all) 'news' organizations actually do get this but it doesn't raise my hopes for the future of objective journalism so I try to keep an idealist perspective here.
Information visualization and its interactive kin are rich and deep ways to navigate typically complex sets of data. The best examples allow the reader to glean some information at a glance and typically provides access to a rabbit hole's worth of information as the reader explores a visualization. For a good example see Marumushi's seminal newsmap. A simple tree-hierarchy that gives a particularly balanced look at how much attention is given to 'news-worthy' events across a spectrum of reporting bureaus, but that also gives you access to the article - hyperlinking is alive and well. By comparison "gritty, investigative reporting" has been on a downhill slide towards highly subjective and personal takes on 'scandals' that I think are more suitable for enquiring minds than constituencies.
This map and its article suggests that contemporary investigative journalism has a chance to regain prominence by finding, analyzing, and sharing information with its audience. In the era of the petabyte the source material might publicly available but it is often so massive or so difficult to aggregate that it is beyond the capabilities of your average citizen - the exact person who should have access to this information - PUBLICLY available - right?
The sea-change in technology that we are in the midst of has changed our expectations. But explosive access to broadband data and shrinking costs of devices will not change our need to understand information, it just gives us more ways to find it. Most of us still need experts to help us makes sense of the things we find in the WorldWideWasteland. I still see doctors whom I trust, and I am not about to trade a them for WebMD... but I will ask them about what I read there because I want them to know I read it, and I want to know what they think. In this way I expand my knowledge base but I don't trade it.
Take a glance at the amount of people who got their news on paper in 1998 and compare it to the most recent data. Its a big shift and as a result the news industry has changed, but not enough. My predication is that journalism is about to make a big swing and the successful journalists will be the ones who can find, analyze, and visualize data effectively - if information is king then opinion is the court jester.
The matrix, the terminator, skynet, nano-bot swarms, predators, carnivore - Asimov was wrong - robots hurt people directly and indirectly, in the movies and in real life. But do we conform and 'welcome our new <something, something> overlords'?! Heck NO!
The intrepid designers at Maya are working on a top-secret project to protect our future from the 'copper-top' scenario that government officials developed into a strategic contingency by homeland security after Lawrence Fishburne gave us the redpill.
Maya design has taken on the no-bid contract to defend us from Judgement Day and built an amazing team around this highly secure project.
EDIBLE ROBOTS!!! Of course! – Now they won't eat us - WE'LL EAT THEM!!!!
This is the exact kind of future-proofing design think that is going to simultaneously launch us out of the Great Repression and secure our place at the top of the vegetarian/robotic food chain for eons to come – and its good for you! Wall street is already showing bullish signs in cucumber futures so if you are an investor, you’d better move quick.
The following video was smuggled out of E.A.R.T.H.S. - the Edible Army, Robotics Testing, and Healthfood Store. A top-secret lab in Modesto, Califronia.
I just been reading about Google's new Wave product on Mashable. Is this an opportunity to break the email kludge? That massive pile of fleeting thoughts, file-attachments, meeting confirmations, and meeting re-confirmations is the digital manifestation of my own anxiety. Some people saunter their cursors over to peek inside the good 'ole inbox for just a sec but its an involuntary reflex of drag and click for me (for so many of us). I feel a combination of fear and anticipation every time - not unlike that split-second before the roller-coaster tips over the edge.
My name is Scott and I am an email addict.
Once I click that innocuous looking postage stamp I cringe as I await the deluge of new messages (66% of which are spam). But when it doesn't come, when I don't receive that pavlovian signifier of novelty, I feel frustration - like the let-down that accompanies an anti-climactic coaster ride. And then I am disgusted with myself for letting my guard down, allowing myself to be distracted from productive single-tasking, to the null-comfort that *might* lie 'inside' the good 'ole inbox.
So like any overindulgent person (eater, shopper, worker), I feel a little sick. I have to push the inbox out of sight – but not before one click of the 'check mail' button. I think to myself, "What if I just missed something?! Maybe I will check again to be sure... and again to be really positive..." - "the click" is such a seductive doorknob. Who knows what lies just across that hyperlink-threshold?
I have an obsessive complex with email, but I am surely not alone. Even if it is an implausibly convoluted message from some bot who wants to sell me v!4gr4 or cxialixs, the immediate satisfaction derived from communication is very hard to ignore. Think about the last time you heard someone call "your" name on the street.
C'mon John, you know you look; expecting to see an old forgotten friend only to find yourself in that embarrassing half-turn that signifies your humanity and shows off that wonderful bipedal flexibility that makes humans the darling of the evolutionary world. - At least you were standing - stretching in fact - I just 'click'.
So fellow evolutionary darlings I hope for all our sakes that Google has invented some secret sauce (it's not just thousand island dressing?) for communication. The video below is compelling but I am not holding my breath. I hope above all hopes that we can escape email-chat-skype cycle, let's see what happens in September - and I certainly hope they figure out a way to integrate the 27,000 messages I already have stored.
Crackberry users - you are not alone, support groups are out there and I've heard that Google is working on a crackberry patch. But you have to want to get healthy. (Hint: Start by looking up when you walk)
Experientia has an article about a game from Philips Design intended to help people build innovative ideas. I think that this is an important idea and a good move from Philips. Its not just a nice idea - its the key to our future, and maybe our salvation.
Philips has long been recognized for bravery, introducing innovative and cutting edge, but also unproven, products. Some have fallen flat but overall, the Philips approach has given it front-runner status in some of the newest and most cutting edge markets in recent history. Healthcare, personal computing, e-paper - the list goes on.
Many of the innovative concepts that led to success were generated in labs, with small teams who were bound by their contracts to keep some of their ideas secret. Keeping secrets is the competitive edge right? Proprietary information and processes are the benchmark of success for many companies - particularly in high-tech industries. Apple's ho-hum new iPhone (3gSPEED) has an entire add campaign built around the 'secret-lab-in-a-mountain' idea (they should have gotten Tom Cruise to hang from the ceiling).
But what about how to generate that information and those processes? Should that be a trade secret?
I think that someone at Philips Design has the right idea and they are introducing it in a safe way. Their new game, 'Spark', is masted as a 'board game that stimulates creativity and innovative thinking'. Of course, their are plenty of games and products that claim this but the takeaway here is that Philips is an innovation company, it has success and innovation in its DNA, so I think that they are warranted to teach others to look at problems the way they do.
In 'Spark', Philips Design has created a product that teaches people to share a successful approach to new ideas (and maybe to recognizing good one's - their good ones :) ). As my colleagues Colleen Macklin and Katie Salen will surely tell you - games and play is how to induce learning.
So, imagine if all of the amazing (or amazingly successful) companies in the world dedicated just a small fraction of their resources to teaching people how they solve problems? Companies could compete on a completely new field of play (no pun intended). At the core of this new competitive landscape? Education of course!
I believe in the free market, but I also believe that sometimes companies need to seek sustainable and useful markets to be free in. Education - innovation, design, and strategic thinking - is that new landscape. I firmly believe that there is an untapped market for education but companies need to shed the mantle of lifestyle design and product delivery and focus on real consumer education. More than ever we need people to START THINKING FOR THEMSELVES AND FOR EACH OTHER!
Just ask Shoshana Zuboff who wrote an article in BW this week that should indicate fairly clearly where she stands on the need for change. I share Shoshana's perspective and am happy this article was published now, when people will hopefully pay some attention. It is critical that we find 'the useful market' in new places, on the ground, and hear about it from new voices, but it is equally important that the useful market be addressed in the exact same places from which the great ideas of our history were framed. Some great ideas and huge successes cause huge problems that we now face - big ideas will always do that. The solutions of the past century have caused problems that will challenge us for at least the next 100 years so we need to be sure that the world is ready to deal with the problems we cause today - time to play!! *knock* *knock* *knock*
In 2006 I worked with Invivia Inc. to redesign the desktop interface for a family. You can see the two projects by clicking clicking on 'work' and then looking at the 'calendar' and 'keeping touch' projects (grrr... flash w/out URL's!). The project ultimately became the HP Touchsmart Home Computer (the clients were, Microsoft and HP) and though it was significantly modified after we transferred our prototypes to them many of our contributions were strong enough to remain all the way through to implementation! For anyone who's worked on a 'vision' project before you know that its important to reach high and think broad, but you also learn to manage your expectations and consider the needs of others when there are a lot of stakeholders involved - something a good design manager really helps you to appreciate.
So it was really cool when I walked into a best buy® one day to see HP's final product and to actually play with it! Its rare to see your hard work manifest itself so clearly in a product, particularly one that breaks new ground and gets good reviews! As a designer, it is rare (and usually enough) just to find your hard work validated through successful use - especially when people innovate with it!
I was doing some research on classroom environments and landed on the website of the HopeTech School. The videos and links below show the best kind innovation - that helps people, shows a clear innovation lineage, and was never planned for. This is a kind of breakthrough innovation that is rare because it happens outside of the competitive market and thus without the market research and demographic focus that tends to be the thrust of many sales presentations.
More about the design process, videos documenting hopetech's work, and a description of the team after the jump...
It seems that the touchsmart has proven itself to be uniquely valuable to children who are autistic, a cognitive difference that creates a wide range challenges for millions of people around the world. Some kinds of autism have common attributes including the particular challenge of speech disability. At hopetech the Touchsmart has been used to give these potentially amazing minds a voice AND to help them learn to use that voice. As you'll see in the videos above and behind the links, the Touchsmart offers a combination of free movement and association, touch sensitivity, voice recording, and note-based organization that actually facilitates learning in physical space! Looking back, I knew that we were doing something right and our clients knew that we had produced something innovative, but as a teacher of innovation it is just awesome to see this kind of diffusion and reinvention in perfect Rogers fashion.
The process was formative, the team was amazing, the project was exciting, and the clients were challenging. It was, by any and all accounts a dream project with a dream team. We worked hard - very hard. We spent hours developing concepts, on the whiteboard, making post-it note interaction models, and all sorts of prototypes. We ultimately came up with a pretty amazing interface that included ...
the flip-through browser (like the apple cover-flow concept but years before they created it ... ;) )
notes that could be created hand-written using a touch screen and then stored
a pretty unique organization and interaction scheme that brought the whole concept together.
high-quality renderings that included textured glass (that one, sadly, did not make it to the final product) and some amazing animation sequences
a kick-*** interactive prototype that John Snavely and I coded completely in actionscript
I know that everyone was proud of the finished product and I was personally, very proud of the functional prototype we handed over. It was one of the most complete pieces of code that I have ever worked on, lacking only a simple database to be a fully functional multi-user digital calendar - how many of those do you see today? Our prototype used the newly released (2006) bit-level capabilities of the flash 8 engine so we were able to implement a multicolor 'ink'-stroke system that had color and photorealism - living up to the standards of our awesome colleagues who set the bar very high with their amazing graphics visions. It had realistic physics motion that you can see in the movie on the Invivia website - so moving a note actually made it swing just like dragging a post it on a table, ... and it had no lag. It worked like a charm!
The team:
First it must be said that without this team, the project would not have manifested in the amazing way it did... and would have been so much less in all respects than the final product proved to be.
Allen Sayegh (Invivia Principal and Founder).
Pierre-Loic Assayeg - Project Manager extraordinaire this gentleman embodies the best of what design management aspires to
John Snavely and I - built the interactive prototypes you can see in the 'Keeping Touch Projects' on Invivia's site (all flash - almost lived at the office - so much fun!!!).
Eva Papadimitriou - worked on interactive prototypes and the high quality renderings you see
Hyejin Lee and Samuel Adrian Massey III built graphic components and developed the interaction models. (oh those sexy sexy highlights and subtle supple gradients!)
Saeed Arida - a digital modeling and rendering machine! The glass and animations that were non-interactive - all him. Still blow my mind. (I would still like to have that pen.)
Emily Guertin - helped us to build and map the interaction entity relationship models. This was not an easy task when you consider that the goal was for anyone to post anything using a combination of token placement, hand-writing, and chronological organization. I can still remember all of the notes, postits and sketches she had to work through to build these diagrams.
Edith Ackerman was heavily involved in the early visioning process. (Aside from my great respect for her she is !)
Each team meeting was an exhausting description of content, features, functions, and vision and when we finally met with engineers, designers, and reps from HP and from MS we got to actually manage a highly technical discussion between two of the largest and most groundbreaking companies in history - look back at what both have actually done... you really can't argue with the precedents that each company set.
I am so proud to have been a part of this project. Essentially it started as a cool design project, but this application and the innovation at hopetech really is the best kind of validation.
I think that it support my favorite comment to students - If you don't start in the right place, then you can't end in the right place. Perhaps an addendum to that could be - ... and if you don't end in the right place, people will their chance to start. Iterative design at its best.
Bruce Nussbaum just posted on the future of BusinessWeek which is up for sale... for 1$. He presents two business models. He concedes that there could be others. I think that he's right but I thought I would ponder his proposals a bit and consider how they would play out. (comments after the jump)
(posted in the comments section of his blog - see trackback)
First a question - Is this bloomberg LLP territory? Might that be a good match? They already have a high-end / high-cost pay model (bloomberg anywhere?) but I wonder how much insight on the data mountain that they mine is actually available. Furthermore, BW seems to have a better, more publicly digestible angle that is one of its strengths. Everyone is mining for diamonds - but there are still so few people in the world who can take a rough diamond and make an object of obsession from it.
Marketing specialty journalism to top executives seems to militate for an elitist agenda (certainly the realm of HBR) and suggests the opportunity for an enterprise subscription model. Does this change the readership of businessweek? Is a smaller and supposedly more elite readership an aspiration? Is it in the best interests of the publication? The current collapse of the manufacturing sector will likely create more opportunities for small-independants, replicating similar post-crash economies throughout history. This would not necessarily work in favor of sharing information and analysis with the top but actually with the bottom - of course, finding that bottom and navigating it is harder than speaking to the suits you already know. What about the international readership that businessweek needs to reach and keep expanding into? Small- and micro- business is the name of the game in countries across in China, Brazil, India, across countries in Africa, and many many other corners of the world. In many of these parts of the world, the 'old' mobile-phone is the mode of information exchange - cheap quick and versatile. Shouldn't there be a model for them? A model like that would certainly not be high-cost/wide margin, but actually low cost/discount margin with less analysis and abstraction but more immediate information. Right? Maybe that makes it more bloomberg than BW territory?
The c-suite model (hope you don't mind my naming it that) might convince businesses to pay premium prices for an enterprise subscription, would this net big $$? Enough to offset the roughly 89% margin that publishing used to garner from advertising? These models, though, suggest that the readership will carry much more of the load - making them what? - more catered to? - more important?
What is the cost-to-privilege ratio that publishers need to meet in this new model? 11% is really not that much given huge amount of individuals contributing to that slice of the pie how much of the remaining 85% can a readership actually carry?
Even if there is some golden ratio for meeting an audience's needs related to their cost of entry, isn't there always going to be an incentive to fit advertising in and then to incrementally increase advertising to increase profit margins? Moreover, in a world of proprietary algorithms of varying reliability and trustworthiness, can we honestly expect 'personalized' advertising to stay in the sidebar? Where is the control mechanism to keep it from hiding in the content and further marginalizing journalistic ethics? What is the oversight model as publishers move to dynamic content and offset their marketing costs by incorporating CPC and CPI models. I see the tracks being laid for a collision between the independent voice of journalism and the co-dependent megaphone of the click-mob.
Assuming this is all resolvable or unimportant, I thought about what the marketing angle might be for those companies that purchase "BusinessSuite". Would it give execs the edge that you suggest rests primarily in the journalists privileged POV? If that is the angle then it leaves two big assumptions to be tested; First, that a professional journalist is anywhere near the center of the information universe and second, that c-suite'rs are the best people to be sharing the best information with.
On the 1st assumption - I believe that jouralists are not the center of the information universe (do you really want to be?). Much like astronomers and physicists, I think that journalists are keen observers of the information universe who can peer into and through it and who (hopefully) have the world's best capacity to research and write eloquent and succinct essays on what they find. Thus helping the rest of us (c-suite'rs and the other 99.9%) separate signal from noise.
On the 2nd assumption - Does it make sense to put a special newstand in the c-suite and take it off the street? Aren't many companies moving in the opposite direction - preferring to share more information at every level of the business and bringing more people into the intellectual part of the business (from the corner office to the copy-room)? At the very least you have to assume that some of the world's largest companies are thinking about how to do more business with fewer employees and hierarchies. This suggests that creating a BusinessWeek that is accessible for many levels of the business is more valuable than giving all of the information to a privileged few. Perhaps this suggests a third business model? - or maybe a "what this means for you" column in your model that will help the erudite masters 'share' with their less privileged colleagues?
So could marketing a publication to individual execs drive a personal database war akin to the rolodex wars of era's past? Tools for personal resource management (Bento, Papers, Bookends, Bloomberg Iphone App, etc.) are in ascendance and someone eventually will make a viable competitor to apple's current stranglehold on the rich-interface appliance market. So would the future BW create something to manage and find resources rather produce a curated weekly volume? Perhaps a resurgence of this kind of hand-to-hand info-combat would be good for everyone. A personal stake in the competition so what about this for the new BW tagline... "For $100 you'll be home for dinner, at your kid's baseball game, and SLEEPING while Bob is still climbing through TPS reports. BusinessWeek - because Bob's still has a rolodex."
Thanks for sharing BW with us BN. Looking forward to reading more.
