Adaptive Path Blog

A podcast of Jesse James Garrett’s impassioned closing plenary from this year’s IA Summit is now available online via Boxes and Arrows.

Jesse’s assertion that we are all experience designers has stirred controversy within the community, and justifiably so. Professional identity is a slippery slope. However, I can’t help but feel Jesse’s important message is getting lost in these discussion threads. Arguing over the definitions of our roles and judging the value of the contributions of each does little good if it becomes divisive within our community. Instead, it distracts us from working together towards the more important common goal: to elevate the understanding of the user experience field to the world at large.

Regardless of your position on this issue, I hope you will give this podcast a listen. It is packed with inspiring messages and ideas. My hope is that it will inspire you to generate a discussion about how we can work together to pursue the ideas – not discussions about our roles, or our processes – but ideas about how we can improve broken experiences in the world, and the big problems our industry can help solve.

In my most recent Harvard Business Online column, I took a departure from my prior discourse, instead meditating a little on being human, and how recent technological development is doing a much better job than organizational development in acknowledging human realities.

From the piece:

…What most excites me about these new means of engagement (which already have amazing successors in university and corporate labs) is that they allow their users to do something that hadn’t been possible five years ago — truly be human. The body is extremely important for human beings, and it’s almost shameful that for so long, such a small part of it was used when working with computers. Mice and keyboards were the product of the Cartesian mentality that mind and body could be separated, that humans could be reduced to brains attached to fingers, eyes, and ears…

…As I’ve been thinking of this technological revolution, I’ve realized we need an organizational revolution. The organizations many of us work in remind me of the state of computer technology from five years ago:

…We’re placed in hierarchical org charts, remnant of railroad and factory operations of the 19th century, and find ourselves in silos that prevent us from collaborating with our colleagues….

…We thus leave the office having only engaged a small part of who we are…

Read the whole thing over there, and I’d love any comments you have.

I’m in Chicago attending the Institute of Design’s Strategy Conference. I’ll be blogging thoughts inspired by speakers.

The event started with a presentation by John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC. He emphasized that the primary challenge organizations are facing as they move forward is overcoming outdated structures. This is familiar territory to anyone who has read David Weinberger for the last ten years… Brown essentially recapitulated Weinberger’s calls for a the “hyperlinked organization.”

The basic idea is that our top-down, hierarchical organizations, pioneered by folks like Henry Ford, are optimized for efficiency of delivery. That’s fine in a manufacturing economy, but we’re seeing it breakdown in a services-lead economy.

He stressed that as a society we’re shifting from being interested in knowledge to being interested in the act of knowing, and as part of that, moving from Homo sapiens to Homo faber — we think through making. He identified the trend of tinkering as part of this, that we learn through fiddling with things. There was a death of tinkering from 1980-1995, when locked-down, microchip technologies made it difficult to take things apart and mess with them, but that we’ve seen a rebirth of tinkering, largely driven by communities finding one another online. (He didn’t mention Make magazine, or the Maker Faire, but clearly these are also part of this movement.)

One thing I wish Brown had done is to reflect on how tinkering is part of the social construction of technology, in that how we tinker, and what we make, comments on who we are as a people.

Brown was followed by Michael Citrelli of Pitney Bowes, who spoke about Dossia, and initiative driven by a group of companies that tries to deliver on the promise of personally-controlled health records, and is a reaction to the skyrocketing costs and less-than-satisfactory delivery of health care in the United States.

The morning closed out with the always entertaining Larry Keeley, who talked about the role of innovation in health care. He suggested a number of approaches for identifiying innovation:

• study new models (such as surgery happening in Asia, at resorts, that costs patients less than procedures in the United States)
• study the high end (such as PinnacleCare, a premium service that navigates the byzantine world of health care for you)
• study the bottom (such as Minute Clinic, which provides fast, affordable health care within CVS pharmacies

Larry also provided a quote from Charles Darwin that we should have included in Subject to Change:

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.