Design and Architecture

April 8, 2009 By

This is a modern nail clipper. It was invented, it appears, by Chapel Carter in 1896. Ask yourself, which elements of this object reflect design, and which elements represent architecture. I am going to offer a fairly clean distinction for you to ponder, but I’d like you to make up your own mind first. You don’t have to be a mechanical engineer or any sort of engineer, architect, artist or designer to answer. Just go with your intuitive sense of those terms, and apply them. These ideas also apply to organizational and social design and architecture.

fingernail_clippers

This piece grew out of an interesting bit of crossfire on Twitter a few days ago. It began when I said:

“Am realizing I enjoy design, but not architecture. Design is the ‘play’ subset of ‘architecture.'”

This provoked an instant response from @jrdotcom, a  software guy I know:

@vgr In software, there is no difference between design & architecture. They are just words that non-programmers have invented.

After a bit of back and forth thesis-antithesis, another guy I know, @jbsil01, also a software guy, offered a partial synthesis:

@vgr as a programmer, design can mean the same thing as architecture. as a user, architecture should be irrelevant to design.

Reflecting on the exchange, I realized that all three positions bother me. My own remark is too flippant, clearly. But @jrdotcom’s position, that there is no substantive distinction, that this is all pointy-haired-boss-speak, at least in software (and I have heard similar views from other sorts of engineers) is too dismissive of the importance of language. And finally, @jbsil01’s reliance on subjective user experience as a fundamental filter to tease the two apart is too pragmatic and operational. So let’s dig deeper. I’ll frame my discussion in terms of engineering, but this applies, mutatis mutandis to other synthesis fields which mix utilitarian intents with aesthetic ones.

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The Slash Effect

March 31, 2009 By

My reading tends to be very random-access; sometimes it takes me years before I figure out the most rewarding perspective with which to read a book. I bought and began browsing Marci Alboher’s (@heymarci) oddball career-guide,  One Person/Multiple Careers several months ago, when she blogged about ribbonfarm.com in the New York Times. But though something about the book was intriguing me, it wasn’t till about a month ago that I found the right perspective. So here is a review/summary, with a couple of editorial thoughts for you to ponder.

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Brain Rules by John Medina

December 3, 2008 By

If you read only two books about the brain, Medina’s Brain Rules should probably be your second one (thanks Kapsio, for the recommendation), after Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. If you’ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you might remember a post I did nearly a year ago called The Broken Brain Books. Let me repeat the quote from Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open that I used to start that post:

…while it is interesting to find out [the] exact addresses [of brain functions], that information is ultimately unsatisfying. Call it the “neuromap fallacy.” If neuroscience turns out to be mostly good at telling us the location of the “food craving center” or the “jealousy” center,” then it will be of limited relevance to ordinary people seeking a new kind of self-awareness — because learning where jealousy lives in your head doesn’t make you understand the emotion any more clearly. Those neuromaps will be of great interest to scientists of course, and doctors. But to the layperson, they will be little more than trivia.

By this critique (which I wholeheartedly agree with), most ‘brain’ books are a big waste of trees. Medina, thankfully, avoids this trap, and doesn’t even mention fMRIs till fairly late into the book, and when he does, he steps away lightly from pointless fMRI-pornography. That leaves us with 12 brain rules, each of which gets a chapter. The chapter on short-term memory for instance, is titled “repeat to remember.” Well Duh! you might say. Fortunately, there are deeper insights buried within. Despite appearances, the book isn’t an exercise in providing unnecessary proofs for folk-tautologies.

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Future-of-Work Mini-X-Prizes at Cloudworker.org

December 1, 2008 By

The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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Is There a Cloudworker Culture?

November 9, 2008 By

When one of my regular readers IM’ed me, “I hope you write about cloudworker culture next,” I almost panicked. All I had in my head at the time was a dark three-word post: “there isn’t one,” accompanying a sort of desperately humorous image: Alberto Giacometti’s famous sculpture Chariot, holding a Starbucks coffee cup and a Blackberry at her hip. The original sculpture suggests a sort of sombre existential loneliness. Add Starbucks and the Blackberry, and the gravitas of the original degenerates to an anxious farce. A tragic farce, because the figure is still lonely. My modest photoshop skills turned out to be up to the task, so here is the mashed-up image I started with, in my head.

Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Cloudworker by Rao (2008); Mashup elements courtesy MOMA, Starbucks and RIM

Immersed in the farcical post-existential loneliness of the Cloud, the cloudworker’s cultural life just might be no more than an impoverished buzz of emoticons. The highlights of his cultural life might be fleeting, unsatisfying encounters with co-cloudworker strangers whose gaze he holds for a second longer than necessary at Starbucks, but does not engage. A condition worse than that of Chuck Palahniuk’s hero in Fight Club, who at least found connection and community by beating other men to a pulp.

If the Giacometti sculpture is too high-brow for you, consider a more popular literary image: Mark Twain’s unforgettable King and Duke characters in Huckleberry Finn, drifting down the Mississippi. Rulers of a Micro-Balkan virtual kingdom on a raft. Farce once again.

But then I figured I was being too dark, and did come up with a bunch of ideas that suggest that a cloudworker culture is emerging. I figured I’d let you ponder the question for yourself before sharing my answer.

So what do you think? Is there a cloudworker culture, or are all us cloudworkers doomed to the socially and culturally empty life suggested by my art mashup?

The Cloud President, Obama

November 5, 2008 By

If Truman was the Nuclear President, Kennedy the Space President, and Eisenhower the Interstate President, Obama will be the Cloud President. Ever since the United States assumed the mantle of global technology leader at the end of World War II, each administration has become associated with a significant technology that radically altered the world. The relationships between presidents and the technologies historically associated with their administrations have been varied. Presidents have caused, benefited from, or been out of touch with contemporaneous technology-driven socio-economic shifts. Presidents who managed to manifest the ethos of the technologies that matured on their watch have been perceived as with-it. Those who failed have had problematic presidencies. Before tackling Obama, cloud culture, green thinking and energy, let’s consult the list of post WW-II presidents for reference.

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Cloudworker Economics

October 29, 2008 By

I started my exploration of the changing nature of careers with a micro-level view of its archetypal figure, the cloudworker. In this second part in the series, let’s take a look at how the cloudworker fits within the economy. The main argument of this article is that the dominant distinction in labor economics, unemployed vs. employed, is slowly getting displaced by a more fundamental one: default vs. exceptional career paths. Think of it as an emerging long tail in the space of career “design patterns” where there are a huge number of sui generis career (and lifestyle) designs. My contention is that this new watershed is primarily being created by technological forces, not economic, demographic or cultural ones, and that this has important consequences. So within my model, the cloudworker is primarily characterized by a technology-enabled my-size-fits-me career. The economic antithesis of the cloudworker is the organization man. Both organization man and cloudworker will co-exist in the future, but the latter, until recently characterized only by negative definition (“not an organization man”) will drive the economy. Here is a picture of where the notion of cloudworker fits, among related conceptual models. The x-axis represents level of dependence on technology for economic production, and the y-axis represents the degree to which the worker is tethered, financially, to a single institution. In this map, ‘cloudworker’ differs from others in being a technology-dependent definition.

Cloudworkers on the My Size Fits Me Map

Cloudworkers on the My Size Fits Me Map

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The Cloudworker’s Creed

October 23, 2008 By

In which we offer up a lyrically-hyperlinked (and determinedly purple) paean to the Future of Work. Even as economic storm clouds gather, a grimly pragmatic worker archetype is floating in on that other sort of cloud, which just came off beta status. Advance apologies to readers on a low-fat diet. Sometimes I just want to cook adjective-loaded long sentences.

The telecommuter is dead; meet the cloudworker (I made up the term for a contest). Commuting being an artifact of the work-life style of the Organization Man, the term telecommuter absolutely deserves to be retired in favor of one that captures the richness of what is actually going on. The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.

Cloudworker

Cloudworker

To paraphrase William Gibson, the cloudworker is already here; he is just unevenly distributed in the workforce.

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Mastering the Hype Cycle by Fenn and Raskino

October 16, 2008 By

You know you’ve got an interesting idea on your hands if it helps you build a fairly compelling case that the Amish are more sophisticated meta-innovators than Fortune 100 CEOs. Mastering the Hype Cycle by Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino of Gartner, manages to do that about a third of the way through. Now, the Hype Cycle (the Wikipedia entry is pretty decent) is one of those intuitive and obvious-seeming ideas that makes you wonder (with 20-20 hindsight), did that actually have to be invented? (answer: yes it did). It’s been Powerpoint fodder for a few years now, and I’ve used the thing myself, to justify proposals. You can think of it as the older, bigger, badder brother of Godin’s Dip. If you aren’t familiar with it, it is a data-validated curve that looks like the picture below, and captures the typical pattern of hype associated with an innovation as it diffuses through the economy:

Hype Cycle (from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Hype Cycle (from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

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The 10 Immutable Laws of Nanoeconomics

October 1, 2008 By

I am about to go all Hammurabi on you and deliver unto you a 10-law summary model of the economy that is taking shape around you at a frenetic pace today: the nanoneconomy. I call it that because its fundamental behavior is determined by the behavior of the human individual rather than the firm (the practical unit of analysis in microeconomics). Many of the dominant themes of this blog — virtual geography (aka globalization) the future of economics, the changing nature of work, and the role of the individual in the economy, all came together for me last week as I pondered the lessons of the political-economy (I love that archaic term) train wreck that is the US Congress’ bailout plan for Wall Street (and Main Street, we are being told). Let me transcribe my tablets for you. For fun, I am calling these laws immutable, but I hope some of you treat this as a mutable blog-meme discussion of the economy, and propose your own amendments.

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