All Things

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

“It has to be about the experience, not just the rides.” - Mark Shapiro, new CEO, Six Flags Inc.

Though on a much smaller scale, it was one of those moments like the Challenger accident that jolt you, imprinting in your memory where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. In my case, I was with my son last September, on our way to seeing the Astros play the Florida Marlins, when the report came over the radio. Six Flags Astroworld was going to be shut down and the land sold for redevelopment.

Now real estate development and redevelopment has long been, together with the energy industry, the lifeblood of the Houston economy, but this time it didn’t seem like good news. I was about 5 years old when the park first opened, and as a child I loved it. Perhaps even more than the rides, I was fascinated by the original world theme of Astroworld, where it was divided into sections resembling the American west, the Orient, the Alps, an old-style main street, etc.

Before the park became crowded with rides, there was a sizable “lagoon” that helped to divide the areas, but unlike EPCOT’s simple circular layout with a lake in the middle, the sections had been carefully designed (as at Disneyland, etc.) to hide much of the other parts and transition seamlessly so you felt more like you were immersed in a single section at a time (this was much easier before the rides got so much bigger).

In essence, the theme park design allowed a visitor (especially a small child who was likely to be overwhelmed with all the inputs) to feel like they were in a certain place in the world, and then a few minutes later to experience a whole different environment (except for the humidity). My favorite ride was an alpine sleigh ride, a mild roller-coaster type experience that went through a sizable manmade mountain which was very cold. Besides impacting even temperature and humidity, the ride gave a child a trip to the mountains, something far outside the Houston experience (Colorado has become something of a Texas colony for this reason).

After a decade or so, the world theme design began to break down. A new roller coaster was built and a large arcade area put in, which perhaps generated a lot of revenue but really didn’t fit (and was pretty tacky). Every year a new ride would be built to use as a selling point to draw people back, and so the lagoon and other open spaces were used up, and the mountain was torn out as well (I suspect the sleigh ride was a considerable maintenance hassle). The park became increasingly crowded with rides and people (since there was less open space) and over the years basically transitioned from a theme park to an amusement park.

Nevertheless, a trip to Astroworld could still be a lot of fun, and with the many fairly new rides and crowds, I think most people were surprised that it closed. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t any warning, and I wonder why city leaders (apparently) didn’t make much effort to hold on to it (to be fair, the news came just weeks after Katrina, and they certainly had their hands - and the Astrodome - full). I was glad I’d taken our large family the year before, the only time we all went together.

Well, I’m still upset that Astroworld has closed, but at least now, thanks to Business Week, I know who to blame. But maybe all will be forgiven if new Chairman Dan Snyder and new CEO Mark Shapiro (from ESPN) do what the article says they’re setting out to do. Rather than focussing just on the rides, they seem to realize the need to emphasize the experience. In other words, theme parks, not simply amusement parks.

One would think the chance to remake dozens of parks would be more exciting than running a sports network or the Washington Redskins (Snyder’s other business). Each park is its own little world, and building and exploring worlds are activities that fascinate a lot of people (see the cover story for the May 1st BW for more on that).

Considering the following three points, I can’t help but wonder if the problem with parks today is that, like Astroworld, they’ve morphed from Walt Disney’s vision of theme parks into simple amusement parks:

1. Customer experience management has become all the rage in marketing. Customers today are buying an experience, not just a product or service.
2. People are overworked and overstressed. When they get a chance to take a break, they are going to want to be in a whole different place doing something totally different than their normal routine, but without a lot of hassles.
3. Fuel and travel costs are up, and many are likely to stay closer to home on their vacations, and these breaks are tending to be shorter but more frequent. Relatively few Americans routinely take long vacations nowadays.

With all this in mind, it would seem that there would be a business opportunity for theme parks catering to folks needing a simple way to take a break and spend time with their family. I hope the folks at Six Flags actually do invest more in the experience and less on giant roller coasters.

A lot more effort needs to be put into design and creativity, and the hassles need to be ironed out and guests given things to do besides just standing in long lines for big attractions. Parks need to be fun, relaxing places for adults and places of wonder for kids.

And by the way, Messrs. Snyder and Shapiro, if you do work out a good formula for a modern theme park, it would be nice of you to try it out here in the Houston area.

There’s a lot of things I like about Business Week, but one thing that really stands out is its unfailing promotion of the importance of industrial design and related creative disciplines to business. Every year, it sponsors (with the Industrial Designers Society of America) the Industrial Design Excellence Awards.

Now they are ratcheting things up another notch, as outlined in the August 1st issue, on using creativity as the centerpiece of a systematic strategy to build innovative companies. It seems the impetus for this new step is a firm conviction on the part of the BW editorial staff that the creative disciplines are key to American industry’s competitiveness in the global market. According to Editor-In-Chief Stephen J. Adler: “we’re saying … that innovation and design point the way out of a lot of the difficulties U.S. companies face as high-paying jobs in tech and manufacturing shift overseas.”

Beyond just an interesting issue on creativity, BW has added a new Innovation & Design Channel on its website. With this step, BW’s editorial staff continues to show unusual foresight (more on this later).

I hope they will continue to lead the way in breaking down the walls between corporate America and the vast body of research that is being done elsewhere, whether in academia, government, or a multitude of private efforts. As I noted in my last post, there are a lot of good ideas out there.

Having done R&D myself for the past 18 years, I know BW is just scratching the surface with the research covered in the August 1st issue. Progress has been rapid in many fields, especially in understanding the differences in how people think and work. Moving forward, I suspect one of the key issues in design and marketing will be determining when to focus like a laser on a particular kind of customer, and when to tailor a design to interface with users in multiple ways that appeal to a broader range of customers.

What we really need at this point is a more rigorous theory of design, which will not only help shore up industrial design’s public image but also make it possible to reliably sort out such issues. In the meantime, BW is to be commended for not letting the issue rest. American industry has a long history of discovering industrial design, turning around its decline, and then redeveloping amnesia about the whole field. With today’s global market, as the BW editors observe, this is no time to let this happen again.

Since my last post on note-taking software, I have run across another program, Curio, which claims to be “the ultimate brainstorming and document management environment”. While I’m not sold on all this yet, and haven’t yet checked Curio out, their assertions attempting to differentiate it from note-taking software brings up an interesting idea.

Zengobi, Curio’s developer, asserts on its web page that Curio’s free-form design allows you more freedom to put things wherever you want, so that your creativity is enhanced. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me, but it brings up an interesting controversy. Most design novices seem to think that a wide-ranging lack of constraint is what stimulates good design, but I strongly disagree. This is at root a philosophical issue - does greater freedom alone invigorate something, or not?

I would say that greater freedom does add life to something, to a point. But without some boundaries to constrain a design, the choices become so limitless that only internal limits of the designer will keep the design on track. A good example of this is what happened in the early years with the Mac when font choices exploded. Only those with a great deal of good taste managed to minimize font usage to the few that were really needed. Apple’s original Mac documentation was an early example of tasteful font usage.

So in other words, most people, even average creative people, need a considerable amount of constraints in order to produce quality designs, and even top designers will probably find limits helpful most of the time.

The point of all this is that in looking for software that helps me think, write, and plan other creative work, I’m generally not looking for some totally free-form approach (this may be where Microsoft is missing it with the Tablet PC). As I reflect more on this, it’s dawning on me that what I really need is an array of tools that all allow creative expression in differing ways but that can be integrated together (unified search, project management, templates, etc.).

It seems to me that most really creative designers have quite a range of tools at their disposal. Susan once worked for a successful industrial designer and he had all sorts of “toys” in his office. Probably the most creative person I’ve ever met, my friend Dave, always amazed me at the wide range of media in which he worked. Maybe the constraint that software should be trying to lift is that of being limited to just the several tools any single program is likely to implement well.

This makes me wonder if what would really fill the bill for idea software would be something like an Eclipse (programming) environment oriented toward creativity, rather than programming. Eclipse allows many plug-in tools to be used together while managing various projects.

The next question I can’t help but ask is, Is there any fundamental reason why the Eclipse environment itself wouldn’t be suited for this? I’m not familiar enough with Eclipse to assess this (maybe the GUI would be a problem for drawing, etc.?), but I wonder if at least parts of it could be used in this way. Then all these different drawing, outlining, note-taking, search/agent functions might be made into Eclipse plug-ins (as is happening with all the programming tools now), and we could work much creatively.

Since I wrote the previous post on the MacTel hardware apparently killing Classic and so two commonly used (by me and apparently a lot of folks) Classic apps, More and HyperCard, I’ve done a little more investigating.

I still haven’t found an application that will definitely import More files correctly. There are a number of More replacements available now, including NoteTaker, NoteBook, DevonThink/DevonNote, and the new TAO outliner. Some of these are more oriented toward outlining, some toward notes. If anyone has experience importing More files into these, I’d like to hear about it.

So far I think (judging only from screenshots) DevonThink is the closest to the sort of interface I’m looking for. I clearly need a pane on the left to access and group multiple writing files (as DevonThink has) to manage my writing, but I also really like the tabbed notebook style interface that NoteTaker and NoteBook have. I’m surprised how hard it is to find a writing program for the Mac that has the file pane on the left (not a pop-out drawer - the worst feature of Aqua - by making me have to move my window around). I guess you could create something like this in NoteTaker, but it should be a standard interface. Again, if any NoteTaker/Notebook users have implemented a left file pane, I’d like to know how you did it.

I guess the issue on the interface really revolves around the fact that you’re trying to do three different things in a notetaking program - create content/writing/notes, manage/find content, and then present content. The real appeal of an outliner is its ability to help organize one’s thinking, but an outline document is far too limiting for this. An overall notes program is needed, but it should have a good outliner in it.

One other program that may eventually make it to the Mac is EverNote. Some folks seem to like it. Its chronological memory could be very handy for finding stuff.

In my own case, I really don’t want to have to use two different programs for writing (and organizing my writing) and for storing notes, and I’d really like what I have to integrate with my Palm. In this category (for the Mac; Microsoft’s OneNote isn’t available for Mac, at least yet), it seems that NoteTaker is the leader right now, and I like the direction they’re taking with adding programmability, which could make NoteTaker a powerful tool. So I’m inclined to go with them, but I want a good writing interface.

I guess I need to try converting some of my More files with Brad Pettit’s More2XML (see last post) and then seeing if any of the note programs can import that fairly well. That might be a good two-step solution.