metacool

Glass Houses

A pretty good Billy Joel album, and a simply great day of design thinking I experienced just the other week at the Philip Johnson Glass House.  I was fortunate to take part in a Glass House Conversation hosted by John Maeda on the subject of Simplicity.  Keen readers of metacool will no doubt recall that Professor Maeda's book The Laws of Simplicity is one of my all-time favorites (be sure to watch his brilliant TED talk here).  His thinking has had an enormous influence on my work.

Each of the attendees were asked to be the guru for one of the ten laws of simplicity.  I chose the 5th law, Differences, which states that simplicity and complexity need each other.  I spend a lot of my time designing and implementing organizational systems which enable people to do things they otherwise couldn't.  I find time and time again that solutions that aspire only to simplicity tend toward the simplistic, and those that embrace only complexity veer off toward a morass of complexity.  Balancing the two, and figuring out where to place the complexity so that it creates value, and how to position the simplicity to extract that value, is the art.  Here's the illustrative example I brought with me to the Glass House, a snapshot of the dashboard from a Toyota Prius (you were expecting something other than a car from me?):

The cockpit of the Prius is one of the simplest on the market.  A digital readout replaces traditional gauges, buttons are few in number and highly considered in placement, and even the gearshift is just about going foward or backward or not.  And yet the Prius is arguably the most complex car you can buy.  Its gas-sipping nature stems from having not one but two motors, connected to the driving wheels by a fiendishly clever transmission orchestrated by a suite of chips of immense processing power.  All of that complexity without a mediating layer wouldn't be the car that non-car people love to own and operate.  The Prius is a great example of the 5th law.

I saw the law of Differences in action at the Glass House.  Having only ever seen the Glass House in history books, I didn't have a feel for the complexity of the campus on which it stands.  Over time, Philip Johnson built a family of structures which work together in quite interesting ways.  For example, did you know that the Glass House has a sister structure in the Brick House?  Here's a view of the two of them:

All of the mechanical needs of the Glass House are met by the Brick House.  An underground umbilical shaft connects the Glass House to a feed of heat from the Brick House.  The Brick House also contains a bedroom for those times when one might like to engage in... er, some more complex acts of human nature than would be appropriate in a public setting.  A Glass House without a Brick House to power and feed it would be untenable.  Even from a purely formal aesthetic sense, the two houses work better together than apart.  Simplicity and complexity need each other.

I really enjoyed the afternoon of conversation on design, business, technology and life.  I've had a fortunate life of exposure to some pretty amazing people and experiences, and this was right up there.  I'd like to show you some photos, not to gloat, but to share some fun stuff from the day in the name of creativity and openness. 

An amazing group of chefs prepared a meal for us in the Glass House.  It centered on themes of simplicty.  Wine was served.

We sat at table together and talked and ate and watched the weather go from stormy to sunny and back again.  You can't help but be immersed in the weather in this architecture.

We had assigned seats.  I sat in a white chair and ate more than my fair share of the edible centerpiece, which was quite tasty in its own right.  This is my favorite photo from the day:

What is this all about?

Designing is the process of linking need with desire. 

It's easier (and better) to sell something which is desirable, rather than (un)desirable.

Desirability is value by another name.  A more insiring and emotive name. 

Would you rather be valuable or desirable?

We're in the business of creating desirability via innovation.

New York Times, meet Alltop. Your disruptor.

Personally, I haven't had much luck with RSS readers.  I suffer from the "weekend barrier" -- I'd rather not spend the time to curate my own collection of RSS feeds, and I often wonder what I'm missing out there that I simply don't know about.

Enter Alltop, a new experiment from Guy Kawasaki and friends.  I like it as brain food: it feels like the New York Times in terms of breadth, but deeper in passion due to the laser focus of each of the "contributors".  It's curated RSS, or perhaps even an edited newspaper, but with a radically streamlined business model, with each of the "contributors" having an individual revenue stream of their own design.  As such, Alltop represents a disruptive business model relative to the New York Times.  Let's see where it goes.

And yes, metacool is part of Alltop!  Definitely take a few minutes to wander through the various sections -- lots of cool stuff!

Quattro!

I'm happy to say that metacool turns four today.  Huzzah!

Four years ago my wife vacationed attended a yoga camp or something in Hawaii and I stayed behind in California because of work commitments.  Me, at home by my lonesome and wondering how I might learn a bit about how ideas diffuse across the web, decided to indulge my 3rd-grade ambition to be a writer, and cranked up this blog by writing a one-liner about the merits of ugly cars.  Thus was born metacool.*

Some 838 posts later, I'm still at it, and I thank you for your patronage and for the great conversations.  The great thing about taking risks in life and just doing something is that unexpected things emerge, stuff you never anticipated would happen.  I can honestly say that this little blog landed me two great new jobs, a new hobby that routinely transports me to a state of flow, and an incredible group of new friends.  Via metacool I've been able to befriend people everywhere from the Middle East to Japan, and just about everywhere in-between.  I've quite literally met some of my heroes, too.  I am very grateful for all of these human experiences.

My wife has been my biggest supporter.  I can be a bit obsessive about my passion for the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.  For example, she came with me the day I visited the Ducati factory, the Pagani atelier, Fiorano raceway, and the Ferrari museum, all without even a pitstop for a coffee, let alone lunch.  That's  love.  Please join me in thanking my wife for her patience and support over the past four years as I've dribbled out these posts.  I'd likely be a little fitter, our household a bit more together, and more rested than I am now if it weren't for the time I spend writing stuff here.  But it is so fun, and I've learned so much.  My wife is just great, and words fail me.

Thanks for quattro, let's go for otto.  And flow.

* actually, I already had a mailing list going on Yahoo Groups called metacool.  Blogging on TypePad, as it turned out, is much cooler than spamming your friends.

Introducing a new blog: Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

Never leave well enough alone.

Spring is in the air, and the team here at metacool world headquarters just returned from a week-long management retreat where, among other things, we decided to revamp the way we go to market.  It's time for some market segmentation.  Instead of delivering metacool goodness through just one tube called metacool, we'll now be delivering metacool goodness through two of these tube structures which we're told make up this internet thing.  More than double the fun, and a new way for me, I mean us, to investigate some passion areas without boring the majority of you all to tears.

If you dig my coverage of the more visceral aspects of our designed environment, please tune your radios to my new blog called Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.  Where metacool is all about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is focused on the visceral side of things.  If I were to imagine a Venn diagram of sorts, then this new one would overlap 90% of its area with the older one.  One can't understand the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life without understand the visceral sides of things, but many folks interested in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life bore easily when fed gearhead gnarlyness more than once a month.  Hence the segmentation. 

If it helps, allow me to sketch out a prototypical target audience member for each blog:

• metacool:  early forties, with 2.3 years of graduate school; enjoys a fine red wine and dines on gourmet Vietnamese cuisine at least 2x per week; can name the drummer on every Coltrane album; also reads the NYT, Winding Road, the Economist, and Monocle (but is unsure where the last publication is going); recently augmented the 1964 Aston Martin with a Breezer Uptown 8 bike.
• Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness:  mental age of 14 regardless of true physical age; likes music a whole lot but suffers from hearing loss from standing too near to too many aluminum-block Can-Am V8's;  likes any number of fine cuisines but is equally comfortable with cheese doodles and a fine light beer from Golden, Colorado;  used to read Road & Track, Automobile, Car & Driver, Autoweek, Autosport, Racer, Motor Trend, Car, Air & Space, and Bicycling, but dumped all of those subscriptions for Winding Road alone; recently modified the 1964 Aston Martin with a supercharged Chevy small-block conversion, and added a Boeing Stearman to the internal combustion corral because of the sound it makes.  Secretly prays each night to receive a Ford rocket Galaxie from the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.  Or both.

Does that help?  In other words, I am both of these blogs, and they are both me.  I want to have a way to explore visceral stuff more deeply without turning off the rest of you.  I am mildly dismayed when metacool is called a "car blog" (it isn't -- I merely use cars as a lingua franca to talk about innovation), but I would love it if Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness were labled as such.  One of my favorite public intellectuals is Russell Davies, and all I'm really doing here is aping him or Kevin Kelly, each of whom maintain a nice collection of inter-related blogs.  Looking at what Russell does, hopefully Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness is to metacool as eggsbaconchipsandbeans is to we're as disappointed as you are.

This new blog is a working prototype.  The graphic design is rough, and some of you loyal readers will recognize some older content.  Thank you for patience and feedback as it moves forward.

Let me know what you think by dropping me a line or leaving me a comment.

AFAQS*:

• Why are you wasting your life blogging about cars?  Well, I don't really blog about cars that much.  But I believe it is vitally important to understand the visceral side of things if we're going to make much progress on planet Earth.  Why doesn't everyone drive a fuel-efficient car?  Why doesn't everyone ride a bike instead of driving a fuel-efficient car?  Why don't we ride public transportation?  All of these have to do with what I call the challenge of making green red, and unless you dive deep in to our reptilian psyches as I plan to do here, I think you lose the big picture.
• Will there be less Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness on metacool?  No.  But there will be more at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness.
• Will the character of metacool change?  I think so, but only gradually.  When I started writing metacool, I was but a lad in my early thirties without a care in the world and a hot 240-horsepower car in the garage.  Now I'm an old man with two kids, a mortgage, and a real job, and my hot car now gets out-dragged by a Camry from Hertz.  As I move through the world, I'm actually less interested overall in aesthetics and product-related stuff, and more interested by macro economics, psychology, and organizational dynamics.  I hope metacool continues to be interesting across those domains.

Oh my goodness, this has to be the most boring post I've ever written.  Let's get back to business!

Ship it!  JFCI!

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

* Anticipated to be Frequently Asked Questions

 

The MacBook Air ain't got nothin' on this: metacool ships another one

Yeah, I dig the MacBook Air, too, but Apple's big announcement of January 15th pales in comparison with big news coming out of metacool today: I'm very proud to announce that today we shipped yet another fantastic offering to market.  It's much cooler than that other thing.

Coming from the same corporate gene pool, as it were, very little distinguishes this version from that of our last announcement in 2005 -- they share not only total cuteness but an amazing list of features and functionality.  And yet each one is uniquely individual.  Look at this feature list and eat your heart out, Apple Design Team:

• a complex, powerful, yet low-power consumption bio-computer running a self-teaching, open-source operating system
• a huge amount of information storage capacity -- won't run out for decades, hopefully even a century
• completely cradle-to-cradle in terms of production materials
• low mass -- all of this in a package only a few pounds heavier than the MacBook Air: a total of 8 pounds, 9 ounces, to be exact
• timeless aesthetics; built for the ages

Branding is still TBD.  Am going to sleep on that (I really need to sleep, come to think of it). 

HonestIy, I can't say that this one is in any way better than the previous one -- I love 'em both.  But, I would say that metacool's software development process has certainly benefited from the real-world experience gained over the past 31 months of intense development activity.  To quote Indiana Jones, it's not the years, it's the mileage.

Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future

Tomorrow I'll be part of a panel discussion at Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future, a conference presented by Harvard Business School.

Professor Jim Heskett will be moderating our panel.  He's written a provocative post on the HBS Working Knowledge website about tomorrow's discussion.  There's on open invitation there to leave your comments, ideas, and thoughts on the subject.  Please do so, as we'll be tackling at least some of them in the time we have tomorrow together, and the discussion will continue online through December 18.

The agenda of speakers at the conference is simply mind-blowing.  I expect to walk away with more than a few new ideas and insights, all of which will no doubt make their way in to metacool.  The entire conference is being held in honor of Professor Thomas K. McCraw, author of my favorite book of the year, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.

My time at Harvard Business School changed my view of the world in many ways, and as a result fundamentally changed my life.  It is very meaningful to me to be back on campus exploring design, innovation, technology, business, and life.

Collaborative Innovation and Collective Intelligence

I recently had the great pleasure of writing this article with Doug Solomon.  Titled "Leadership and Innovation in a Networked World", and published by the MIT Press's innovations journal,  this essay takes a look at what's happening to the state of the art of getting stuff done in a world where having meaningful interactions with people via things like Google Docs, iSight video cameras, and yes, even World of Warcraft, has become an everyday reality.  Here's the heart of the article:

Unfortunately, by seeking the rare brilliance of a limited few instead of the statistically likely success of the connected many, the “lone genius” worldview has limited our ability to make meaningful progress in everything from technology, to organizations, to education, and all the way to society. We’ve done very little to systematically develop technology to support the innovation process. Overall, we are still in the “horseless carriage” days of living in a truly networked world. We can do better, but how do we begin to engage this new way of being? We believe a path to the future can be found by paying conscious attention to evidence of what works in the world today, and by asking the following questions as we work:

• What are some of the enabling collaborative tools available today?
• What lessons can be learned from organizations doing networked innovation?
• How do things get done in a networked world?

Writing this essay was a chance to learn by doing.  Though Doug is a colleague of mine at IDEO, and we sit in the same building, we almost never see each other because we're always off cranking on some interesting, but separate, project.  That, plus the fact that we're both crazy busy, led us to use Google Docs to help us write the article in a collaborate way.  We began the essay at 11pm in the lobby of a hotel after the first day of the Fortune iMeme conference, and then proceeded to write it whenever we each had time.  For me, that meant waking up at 5am on a Sunday for some quiet working hours, or writing a few lines while sitting, delayed, on the tarmac at DFW.  Over 744 (!) revisions later, Doug and I had what I hope passes for a coherent essay, and during all those days of writing, we only worked face-to-face two or three times.  There's something to this technology-enabled collaboration stuff.

DigitAll magazine

Here's a link to an interview I did with Samsung's DigitAll magazine.  Also interviewed are Dave Lawrence of Shimano, Pandora's Tim Westergren, and Chris Beard from Mozilla.  There's some interesting stuff in there.

All quiet at metacool

Sorry for the recent radio silence here at metacool. Everything is a-okay.  Been busy at conferences, endurance car races, taking care of the family, and work.  The good news is, I'm now swamped with interesting ideas.  It'll all brew up in to some good blog fodder, I reckon.

Now, it's time to crack open a tasty new book about Porsche 550 Spyders... a wonderful form of structured procrastination if there ever was one.