In my initial thoughts yesterday after the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 I reflected that the Forum left me feeling disappointed in myself, that I don’t think far enough ahead or broad enough and consider other factors on the work I do. Having slept on it I realise now that the self-flagellation was unnecessary, but there are some important lessons I took away from yesterday’s presentations.
Keep your eyes open
We need to make assumptions to get anything done. That’s just a fact of life. You assume the sun will rise in the morning, you assume you’ll still have your job when you go to work, you assume that technology will continue to evolve and that people won’t suddenly forget how to operate a mobile phone overnight.
Many assumptions should be treated like toothpicks — they’re just scaffolding and temporary constructs used to get the job done but should be replaced by something more substantial before you ship. I recently worked on a project where lack of rigour in design, project management, business analysis and user research left me with having to document an absurdly long list of assumptions that I knew were unreliable but I had to work with something and so every release of my user interface was accompanied with a lengthy disclaimer advising the project team of the assumptions I was working with and with a dire warning they needed to be tested as soon as possible.
Whilst Genevieve Bell’s presentation at the Innovative Ideas Forum 2010 was intensely interesting with lots of facts, figures, predictions and stories I think the most important take away was that we need to open our eyes and realise we’re making more assumptions than we probably realise. Predictions of future trends that everyone has just jumped on-board with that simply aren’t likely.
For example, the idea that in the future everyone will be connected to the Internet and businesses and government will move to providing products and services primarily online. Not going to happen. Genevieve cited a study in the US and UK where around 50% of people who are currently disconnected from the Internet were previously and have made the decision to go offline!
Think about telecommunication companies increasing mobile phone coverage, only to find they’re pissing off people who had bought holiday homes in remote areas deliberately chosen because they were outside mobile coverage so they could go off the grid and disconnect from society. Genevieve was critical of the term “Digital Divide” because the phrase implies people need to transition from some medieval-like existence when in fact no such requirement exists; it’s a false cultural imperative.
People think the TV is dying, being replaced by the Internet when in fact the research shows that in some cultures TV use compared to Internet is actually increasing.
Do designers of technology take into consideration how people share devices with their friends and family or that 30% of Western households comprise of just one person? How about the increasing size of houses in Australia compared to the high-density housing in Asian countries? What about the fact that the US is now in the minority of Internet users and English is quickly losing it’s place as primary language on the web?
Genevieve also cited the case study where the BBC launched their iPlayer, seriously congesting the UK’s Internet infrastructure — who predicted that?
There were more stories and case studies for which there’s no room to include them all here, however as I said the biggest lesson I got from Genevieve’s presentation is that we just don’t know what the future has in store. We need to be open-minded and sensitive to the fact that we will discover unintended applications for our work, there will be unexpected consequences, and we need to broaden our thinking beyond the immediate.
e-books are nothing more than backlit pages
Mark Pesce’s presentation on hyperdocuments, the web and the future of publications was thought-provoking. A new way of thinking about links on a web page that make the page dynamic, like a centrifuge where two opposing forces try to both keep the user on the page and also try to fling the user off onto another page.
Mark argued that we are not suffering a decreasing attention span but that information is becoming more complex and that traditional boundaries on text such as the covers on books should be seen for what they are and that the future lies beyond such arbitrary boundaries where the focus is on making information digestible, not forcing people to sit through a whole book.
It was a bit hard to visualise this future because there’s no information system that currently supports this idea of atomised information linked together in a way that allows the reader to course through a text, a topic or idea without the hard black-and-white navigation of current hyperlinks that causes readers to abort a text half-way through to go elsewhere.
Mark was disappointed over the hype around e-books. Publishers have simply taken existing texts and put a light behind them without taking advantage of the opportunities of the new medium! Publishers have taken this shallow approach to the adoption of the technology because it fits with their current business model and is easy, but the future of books and publishing will be much more visionary.
You can also now view a video of Mark’s presentation.
The other talks from Brianna Laugher, Kent Fitch, Rob Manson and Nicholas Gruen were also interesting and I might cover some of my ideas inspired by them in later blog posts but Mark and Genevieve’s presentations were definitely the two key ones for me and made me want to spend more time just … thinking.
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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I have an idea where a person can set a follower limit on Twitter to what he so chooses.