Imagine A Radical Future

I was reading about the iPhone 5 a couple of days ago (who wouldn't be). An article by Mat Honan at Wired really struck me more then most of the usual drooling stuff. Not that I dislike the drool, despite what damage it does to my keyboard. With a nicely provoking title (The iPhone 5 Is Completely Amazing and Utterly Boring), I was all set to froth at the mouth. Until I read it. Without stealing the thunder from Wired, the conclusion right at the end pretty much sums up the argument.

But the iPhone? It’s boring. And it’s probably going to remain that way for the foreseeable future. It’s not bad, it’s just the march of time and technology. Revolution becomes evolution. And that phone in your pocket–or more to the point, in the store window–becomes just a part of your life. It’s something you use, something you rely on. And then completely forget about. And in its own way, that’s actually kind of mind-blowing.

Essentially, all radical revolutionary design pathways at some point becomes evolutionary improvements on the same path. I don't want it to be true. I've become accustomed to the mind-blowing design that continues to seep out from under the door at the secretive Cupertino design factory. I have visions of design oompa loompas and vast lakes of... what? I'm not sure of the design equivalent for chocolate. Anyway, I'm missing the point. The point is that evolutionary and revolutionary work together on the road into the future. 

It was magical to change from the Nokia brick I had at university with it's postage stamp sized screen to the bright (and massive) touch screen of the iPhone. Yet, large touch screens  are now included in most modern smart phones. What was ground breaking becomes commonplace.

I think there are a lot of concepts that help us take a groundbreaking idea and optimise it. But how do you generate the revolutionary idea? The thing that seems to leap forward past all the competition?  

Vannevar Bush imagined a revolutionary future in a ground-breaking article, As We May Think, where he describes what sounds a lot like a modern computer, with control inputs, outputs. There were things that sounded like hyperlinks as well as functions for image storage and retrival. This would seem commonplace, except for the fact the article was written in 1945. The computer (or 'Memex') descrived in the article was the size of a small desk. At the time of the article, the nearest computer took up several floors in a large building.

It seems such a leap to go from a building sized computer to a desk. How did he do it?

I think he imagined a very different context to his own.

I've started to really appreciate the power of context on the human imagination. We really are constrained by our social, political and technical context. Some leaps seem possible, especially when technology reaches the point where can deliver on the imagination. Other leaps seem too improbable and are quickly discarded by a negating impulse. 

So how do you go about imagining a radical future? 

1. Shut down negating impulse

Prepare yourself by shutting down your negating impulses. Our instinct to negate crazy ideas will negate anything new before you have had a chance to think it. 

2. Look to the future

Look to the future by considering technologies that seem just on the cusp of being viable and explore what opportunities they give you. I think much of the future is being invented in laboratories, not company boardrooms. In physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. New materials are being developed, new processes, new substrates upon which we can base the next leap forward. 

3. Look to the past.

Consider alternate worlds where specific variables are different. I leave it Big Bang Theory to provide a light hearted example via the game of Counterfactuals.

Shellshock. Whiplash. Overload.

What a month or so. Give me half a chance I am sure I will be sitting on a park bench somewhere in 50 years time reminiscing about the two months from September to October '11, 'them were big ones'.

Demibooks, the company I co-founded reached a funding milestone.

There was the release of an apparently deflating iPhone 4S. However, the rush of sales that proved many a pundit wrong or irrelevant. The iPhone 4S is selling like the proverbial hotcakes. It may have something to do with the super sexy Siri (Hal 9000's little sister). The age of the talkative machine is coming and no one knows where it well end (as long as it doesn't end like it does in the movies!)

An IT industry rocked by the news of Steve Jobs death, something that seemed unexpectedly and perhaps irrationally to affect the world at large. A single death that had a much deeper impact on those working in user experience and design.

For a company that appears to scorn the classic UX techniques, they sure produce a vast number of incredible technological hits that in turn create large scale social change. Devices that have pushed experience into the frontal lobes of technologists worldwide.

The Kindle Fire, the first tablet (other then the iPad) that seems to hit a sweet spot of gear + content.

Apple and Samsung take it to the patent ring to duke it out.

Facebook Timeline. Your Life digitized in one long timeline.

Technologies like Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook mobilizing civilian armies worldwide to protest socio-economic inequality. Protesters using twitter as a political platform (again) when occupying Wall Street.

Meanwhile, the cynical could argue that the froth of high-technology and social movement has done little to address truly wicked problems, like a famine threatening to break out in the Sudan.

Truly a month made of equal parts joy, sadness, devastation and hope.

Technology is scary without Steve Jobs

I'm writing this on an iPhone, which should say a lot. My last phone was a Sony Ericsson. I loved it. It could take pictures, it had a very basic form of email. My phone before the Sony was a glowing green screen Nokia. The old candy-bar style phone that you could safely hit with a hammer. 

Then I got an iPhone (the less we say about that relationship, the better).

Needless to say the iPhone, for better or worse, redefined by perception of what a phone (computer?) could do.More importantly, my iPhone redefined what technology should really be like. I have always had the idealistic view that the best technology becomes invisible.

My iPhone is not invisible. When it is in my hand it is far from out of mind. Sadly, it is probably the only thing in my mind. The iPhone provides entertainment and therefore attracts my attention. 

But when I want to do a task, it is so much easier to do it on the iPhone, when compared to the same task on other phones of equivalent capabilities and functions. Trust me (or don't), as an experience architect, I come into contact with a lot of newest gadgets on the market. Nokia, Blackberry, Droids. I've tried them all recently. The phone that was a relief to return to, was my iPhone. 

As I mentioned before, it may be that the mark of truly significant technology is that it fades into the task. I also mentioned, the iPhone does not do that. Very few technologies do this (except the humble automatic sliding glass door which opens without me even thinking about it. Magic.). However, the iPhone (and other Apple products) come closer then any high technology product has come before it.

But I hated Apple originally. My initial experience with Apple was
with a Apple IIGs, at a time when my friends had the latest IBM or clone machine. They could play games and I could barely find a copy of Frogger. 

Fast forward to the last couple of years and I am an Apple advocate. Have I consumed the kool-aid? Has the famed reality distortion field warped my gaze? I don't think so. I just got tired of working on my technology, I wanted to work with it to do my job, or write, or use the internet. Spending hours a day tweaking non-Apple hardware was taking my time away from actually doing the work. 

Then Steve came back. And it all changed. 

But that is a simplistic perspective. I get that. Cook, Ives and others are leading figures and true sources of work. But I can't help but wonder if there is something beyond that, something intangible. Some like vision, or guts. Vision to see a different technology and the guts to (arrogantly or otherwise) make it happen. 

The language of compromise is everywhere. Product after product enters our markets guiltily draped in compromise before it has even made it off the shelf. Plastic parts, weak keyboards, Operating Systems that show the influence of a thousand different chefs and no Head Of The Kitchen.

And that is just it. Steve Jobs, head of the kitchen, and his Degustation the stream of Apple products that have redefined markets, pushed Apples market share to the stratosphere, given them a cash kitty larger then the US government. 

Is that too much to lay on the now thin shoulders of one man? Perhaps. 

A very small part of me still shivers a little, hoping that there is still vision at the helm to keep the overwhelming aspects pf technology at bay.