I found this piece about “Flow – public lighting” at Industrial Design Served. Go check out the whole thing because it’s clever and interesting and beautiful. I’m especially interested that my user experience designer friends see it.

When I first saw it, I was first struck by its elegance and beauty. The whole green angle is clever as well. But right after that, I immediately wondered, “do these things put out enough light?” And that got me to wondering about the whole project. Did the green aims of the designer distract them from other more pragmatic concerns? Is there some visceral value to be derived from the aesthetic that makes up for its lack of usable light? Was significant illumination necessarily a part of the project requirements? Should it have been?

I don’t have satisfactory answers, but I think this kind of design can often bump up against some of the sensibilities of the more technically minded people I’ve known. I wonder how user experience designers might look at this question. I would imagine they might recommend some kind of anthropology be done. I imagine they would suggest best practices for adducing the knowledge needed to make decisions. But what is your gut reaction to this project, UX peeps? Does your gut tell you the outcome is satisfactory?

It seems to me that there are basically two worldviews from which this kind of thing emanates. One is what Robert Pirsig would call the “classical” worldview. This view looks at how things work—what you might call underlying form—and the people that tend to hold it seem to have an intuitive understanding of systems, their workings, and their inputs and outputs. The other worldview is what Pirsig would call the “romantic” worldview. This view looks at experience—the esoteric—and the people that tend to hold it seem to have an intuitive understanding of people, relationships, and other organic structures.

When my friend the IT pro tells me someone doesn’t get it, I’m pretty sure I know what he means. He means that person doesn’t understand the causal chain that holds the system together. He means that person doesn’t know how it is that they managed to turn that box into an open SMTP relay. He means they don’t understand what inputs to deliver to the system to get the desired outputs. He means they don’t understand some or all of what happens to the inputs once they’re inside the system.

When my friend the advertising creative director tells me someone doesn’t get it, I’m pretty sure I know what he means, too. He means that person isn’t grooving. He means that person isn’t able to perceive the subtle elegance of human desire. He means that person is uninitiated into the arcane college of the storyteller. He means they lack a sensitivity or familiarity with the archetypes and other patterns that speak to something that is profoundly constitutional about the human being.

This particular creative director I’m thinking of has said things to me before that expose his bias regarding the approaches taken by people like my IT friend. And the IT friend has said things that expose his bias regarding the approaches taken by people like my creative director friend. They don’t know each other, but I’m sure they’d like each other quite a lot. But when considering how to approach some problem, they would employ significantly different strategies. And they’d probably be, at minimum, skeptical about the other’s strategy.

What is interesting to me is that my creative director friend—and the understanding suggested by his approaches—has a value that is extremely difficult to quantify. It’s also difficult to demonstrate. There is a reason why Shakespeare resonates through the centuries in a way that his contemporaries do not.  This reason is accessible only to those that “get it.” But this getting of it is something that happens in an esoteric way. Systems aren’t like that. That you do or do not understand how a system works can be empirically demonstrated; that you do or do not understand Shakespeare’s endurance cannot.

I think that when a creative says, “they don’t get it,” there would seem to be a special significance. The creative is trying to address some tangible goal, but the tools she wields are subtle and arcane. These tools hold the power to affect many, including those who won’t or can’t acknowledge their value.

Creatives can’t go around bitching about this and act like that is tantamount to a solution. Creatives can and should learn about and create new tools for demonstrating their value. Creatives need to learn more about systems and earn some respect. But they also need to experiment with and champion new kinds of systems that are consonant with the creative worldview. They need to work to introduce creative approaches into the decision making processes that otherwise go generally unaddressed by creative firms.

Managers, engineers, executives and other systems thinkers can’t go around bitching about people not getting their systems and act like that’s tantamount to a solution either. They need to try to learn a little something about art and its relationship to volition. They need to mentally provide for the possibility that something they don’t understand and can’t quantify really can be powerful. And they need to reach out and collaborate with creatives around the question of where and what to measure.

I don’t think I’ve adduced some profound solution here. I think it’s really rather a bare minimum. Because for both parties, “they don’t get it,” can just be a big cop out. It gives rhetorical cover to a sense of superiority and most importantly, it justifies apathy in the face of creative challenge. If “they” are going to “get it,” it won’t be because “we” complained that they don’t.

Friend and smart person, Brad Nunnally, notes a far more compelling post than mine what seems to have some connection. It is written by a Mr. Andrew Hinton, and entitled, “Why We Just Don’t Get It.” This bit seemed particularly salient:

Recently I’ve had a number of conversations with colleagues about why certain industries or professions seem stuck in a particular mode, unable to see the world changing so drastically around them. For example, why don’t most advertising and marketing professionals get that a website isn’t about getting eyeballs, it’s about creating useful, usable, delightful interactive experiences? And even if they nod along with that sentiment in the beginning, they seem clueless once the work starts?

Or why do some or coworkers just not seem to get a point you’re making about a project? Why is it so hard to collaborate on strategy with an engineer or code developer? Why is it so hard for managers to get those they manage to understand the priorities of the organization?

And in these conversations, it’s tempting — and fun! — to somewhat demonize the other crowd, and get pretty negative about our complaints.

While that may feel good (and while my typing this will probably not keep me from sometimes indulging in such a bitch-and-moan session), it doesn’t help us solve the problem. Because what’s at work here is a fundamental difference in how our brains process the world around us. Doing a certain kind of work in a particular culture of others that work creates a particular architecture in our brains, and continually reinforces it. If your brain grows a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if it grows a set of jumper cables, everything looks like a car battery.

You should, y’know, read the whole thing.

Is computerized food production the final frontier for futuristic home design? Mass production has transformed virtually every modern domicile-related industry, from house building to furniture construction – and now, innovative technologies are promising use the finest gourmet culinary delights straight from a household machine we can keep right in our kitchens.

Read more: Try a Byte: 3 Futuristic Food Printers to Produce Fine Cuisine | Designs & Ideas on Dornob

The reason I’ve always wanted lateral search, is that one of the joys of the web for me has always been serendipity. The web is simply filled with opportunities, when looking for knowledge, to find something amazing that you didn’t expect to find.

Chris Brogan has contemplated Twitter as a Serendipity Engine. I think there’s something to this, because today I happened across a tweet from Maarten Verkoren that contained a link to a blog post about a cursor kite. I originally saw the cursor kite at Beautiful/Decay, but Maarten’s link went to yay!everyday, a site I’d never seen. It’s filled with links to gorgeous and interesting art and design. As I perused it, I came across the link to the post at shape+color about anitabling.

You see, Jeremy Elder, the dude what runs shape+color stumbled upon the Flickr stream of anitabling, and came across the amazing work this anitabling has done with paper. The beautiful thing is, he can’t find anything else on this person. He assumes her name is Anita and that she’s a she. Beyond that and what appears to be Portuguese in her Flickr stream, he knows nothing else about her. It’s a gorgeous example of the serendipity I’m talking about.

His recent post, The Largest Show on Earth, is what brought me to him. I’ve been trying to reconstruct how I found it but, sadly, I cannot. It’s a simple and clever little post about Bauhaus and MoMA’s Bauhaus exhibit. Part of what struck me about the post was a quote from Michael J. Lewis.

There is a disturbing egoism which, in part, animates modernism (and its progeny, or deconstructions, or whatever). We are creative. Add humility and you have a moving aspiration. Add ego and you have the will to power. I remember riding a tour bus through Moscow in 1990 and looking at austere apartment building after austere apartment building and feeling a profound sense of loss. Milliner also notes in his post, that in the early 20th century, “They knew it as … Volkswohnung (people’s apartments) that would mercifully provide affordable design for the masses. We know it as Ikea.” This overweening drive to bestow beauty on the hoi polloi is merely annoying but acceptable when applied to teapots, but becomes inhuman when the scale is grand.

It is fitting that Mr. Milliner should have occasioned these thoughts for me, given his putative Christianity. I say that because I’ve often thought that what was meant by the suggestion that we were created in God’s image is that we, too, are creative. When the wu wei of the creativity forms its impetus, I think we’re most authentically realizing this divine origin. When the impetus is framed by the notion that you have the answers the world needs, I think the result is something less dignified.

For those that don’t know, GPL is a “copyleft” license. It provides a framework by which software source code can be freely distributed, and ensures that any derivative work carries the same expectation of free distribution. Which, I think this is a great thing, isn’t it? Because of GPL, we have innovations that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Mobile devices, embedded devices, start-up businesses; a great many things have been the beneficiary of the open source movement.

There’s just one little problem. Many proponents of open source seem to be suggesting that all software should be free. What’s more, they spare no sophistry to make their convoluted case for how software should somehow transcend the property rights that made its existence possible in the first place. This strikes me as not such a good thing for open source.

If you click through to the Groklaw post, you’ll see their diagram. I’ve altered it above. You can click the image in this post to see it at full size. You see, I think they’ve left out the most important input. Without this input, open source goes away. The input is the livelihood made by open source contributors at their day jobs. Without proprietary software firms, these open source contributors would have no income, and would be too invested in finding other employment to be donating their time to this ostensible barter cycle.

My point is that GPL is an epiphenomenon of the marketplace. Take away property rights wholesale, and you kill open source. In the vacuum left by any hypothetical abolition of proprietary software, there is no mechanism by which developers can be compensated for their work. A working copy of Linux doesn’t pay your mortgage or put food on the table.

A sober analysis would seem to suggest that open source advocates would appreciate the existence of the proprietary software market. As it stands, open source ideologues often gesticulate grandly so as to distract their proselytes from the basic economic facts. <yoda>Cutting off their noses to spite their faces they are.</yoda>

Props to PO1R, who created the diagram at Groklaw, and Larry Ewing in turn for the Tux logo used therein.

Well, it does to me anyway.

I happen to believe that, fundamentally, design is vision. Designers are necessarily visionaries. A designer was somewhere in the process that brought a helmet to Pat White. A designer will be involved in the process of creating a better helmet, one that right now, simply does not exist. The endless parade of infographics we’ll be seeing as the NFL Playoffs approach will satisfy, or not, in large part depending upon the scope of the vision of their designers. What is the Burj Dubai if not a testament to vision.

Increasingly, design is married to technology. Perhaps it has always been thus. Technology provides the platform, implements, and canvas. Technology is the currency of design; the currency of vision.

But there is a terrible pain here. These two worlds, technology and design, each carry their own preconceptions, language, and posture. The people that populate these domains of knowledge and practice have great difficulty getting it together. Yet, somehow, they do. There is an alchemy in that connection.

Which, that is where Orphic enters. This blog is an exploration of the whole Venn diagram of design and technology. Orphic is very fortunate to have as authors, a collection of very thoughtful, skilled, and talented people. We’re still preparing their bios and providing them the ability to begin posting, but the diversity of their knowledge and insight will soon be apparent.

We appreciate your visit and patience as we get everything in working order.

Great. Social rocks. It does. But it’s not there yet. Because we’re not there yet.

McLuhan suggested that ‘we become what we behold’ and ‘we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.’ When tools change incrementally, they are merely extensions of a given set of models and metaphors. Computers are incremental innovations that fit perfectly in the 350 or so year old models and metaphors that shape our collective worldview. However, when tools change radically, they create new models and metaphors. The printing press, it can be argued, presaged the enlightenment.

Our tools appear to be changing radically at present. The tools are no longer linear machines that are easily described using enlightenment models. Social tools cultivate organic structures that are non-linear and non-deterministic. They look like neural nets. It is said that the 20th century belonged to physics and the 21st will belong to biology. The models and metaphors suggested by the networked tools we’re increasingly beginning to use look like biology. They suggest new possibilities for all kinds of structures.

In “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies“, Douglas Hofstadter describes a sophisticated computer program that solves word puzzles in a manner that much more accurately represents the way a human would solve them. The structure of the program is not the traditional top-down hierarchical approach. Instead, it is modeled on a biological cell.

The structural model of the corporation can be informed by these metaphors. Management structures will be transformed. The interface between business and consumer will be transformed. The consumer experience will be transformed. The political structure of the relationship between the market, the communications culture and the consumer will be transformed.

Social Media is one of another in the set of tools starting with the computer network that have commenced this process. But they’re just the tools. We have to transform ourselves. We are as geese in bottles and it’s time to free ourselves. As Thomas Kuhn said of scientific revolution, it often requires 20 years for the generational change to transpire that allows a new model to assert itself. This is because those who have spent their lives in service of the old paradigm are loath to allow it to depart. Our current economic milieu—”The Great Disruption” as Scott Anthony puts it—may be hastening this process.

Which, I suppose, is a good time to say, follow me on Twitter, or on FriendFeed or add me as a friend on Facebook or connect with me on LinkedIn.