Technology's Shadow

How exactly does one “balance” technology? What is there to balance? More importantly, what would one even balance against? As a man of rigor, I performed an exhaustive, five minute scouring of the internet and as far as I can tell, there is no antonym for the word “technology”…and that’s just weird. If we trust the ol’ Oxford English (which, of course we do) technology is defined as “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.”

I know…this feels like the start of a terrible high school humanities essay, but bear with me.

In the absence of a proper yin to technology’s yang, it can be helpful to break things down and study from the ground up. At a glance, this definition seems quite innocuous – we conjure images of early man bashing a wheel onto a cart or using fire to cook meat. Technology is our friend. Technology has made our lives easier. Technology has saved us all.

However, if we read the above definition closely, cross our eyes, hop on one foot, rub our bellies, pat our heads and let the gravity of these words sink in, we begin to visualize the grossly intimidating breadth of this word. From the tiniest microchip to the largest building, the fastest rocket to the slowest-motion camera, technology is no longer our harmless, quaint little friend; it has evolved into an intricate beast the likes of which no single human can comprehend in its entirety. Hundreds of years ago, technological innovators were diverse individuals who were able to span a number of different disciplines and create new discoveries from the comfort of their bathtubs. These days, the bleeding edge of most technological pursuits exists in state-of-the-art laboratories and the minds of only the top scholars in the world. Breakthroughs have dropped from the realm of popular noteworthiness because the common person can no longer comprehend the development of modern technology let alone play a role in it.

Dare I be so bold as to say that in this day and age, it is impossible to divorce the word technology from the word complexity?

Not so say that complexity is entirely a bad thing, however, it muddles the value of our scientific progress and makes advancements increasingly difficult for businesses to grasp and apply to their products. Yes, businesses can hire these top scholars to push the envelope of technological progress, however, until we also have applied design minds to understand the core value of scientific advancement, we stand to lose much of that value in translation to a consumer product.

While historically, technology has led to massive breakthroughs and steps forward in our societal and economic progress, recent years have felt a lot more like we’ve just been spinning our wheels. Granted this is a massive oversimplification of a complex ecosystem of gadgets, organizations and people, however, countless businesses seem to waste inordinate amounts of time and effort forcing cutting-edge technology into their products without first properly considering their end goal.

The hypocrisy of an individual such as myself - a former robotics engineer, gadget junkie and proud owner of more pieces of computational doohickery than I care to even count let alone admit to – writing this article is not lost on me. You may question the origins of this luddite-esque heresy. In fact, this rant is brought to you by one of the most important adages for all designers and engineers such as myself: K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). A true designer knows the value of minimizing complication for the end-user and in a world where technology is increasingly becoming defined by complexity, the antonym to technology may just be simplicity.

This article is far from a cry to put a halt to the exploration and advancement of academic institutions and research labs around the world – those crazy technocrats may continue to lick batteries to their hearts content and concoct a world of increasingly superior mouse traps. However, to the designers and product developers of the world: get your heads out of your asses. The value of your work is defined not by your ability to incorporate the greatest amount of next-gen tech into your designs but instead by your ability to keep things simple enough for people to actually understand how to use it.

Building a Better Man

I recently completed a series of articles analyzing how we structure and operate businesses. In these four articles, I analyzed corporations at various stages of life – infancy, youth, adulthood and old age - by taking the corporate personhood metaphor far more literal than it should ever be taken. In doing so, I wanted to find extreme examples where the corporation as a person made no sense, extract a few chuckles and, if I was lucky, stop someone from laughing for just long enough to realize that the point being made may not be so ridiculous after all. My goal was to entertain, but also to fool the reader into catching small moments of conscience or confusion that found truth in words so outlandish that one couldn’t help but question our way of running businesses.

My core thesis with these articles was that corporations are an extreme form of person – all profit and no empathy – that benefit from many of the same rights as people, but are not held to the same standards. It’s not just that this creates unethical businesses or amoral organizations; my largest issue with the corporation as it has manifested is that we have created exceptionally dumb organizations. By maximizing profit, we’ve minimized thinking. We can’t really be mad when corporations cut corners, cheat the system and generally screw people over to make money – we designed them that way. That old saying about the type of person who would crawl over their own mother’s dead body for a buck – we actually made a type of person that deems that sort of behaviour as perfectly logical.

I don’t want to see the end of the corporation, and I hope that didn’t come across in this series. What I want to see is a better kind of corporation. I don’t simply want more ethical corporations, I want smarter ones. I want corporations that are not as near-sighted; those who have the freedom and ability to break the shackles of the quarterly earnings statement in order to focus on a more holistic, long-term strategy.

I want corporations to have two considerations to maximize: profit and social good. Will these two considerations be at odds at times? Yes. Will this new corporation be an easy entity to design? No. Will the resultant design be a much more complex, confusing, ambiguous and at times frustrating environment to work within? Yes; that’s the point. I want to design healthy tension into the way we work. I don’t want to have an obvious answer – will it make money? - to every question.

Simplistic corporations allow for - nay, encourage - simplistic thinking. This should disgust us. The human brain is an intricately complex vessel that allows us to hold exceptionally involved thoughts and ideas. Our minds are playgrounds for creative thinking; however, they’re also lazy. If we design an easy way out, they’ll take it. As such, if we want better thinking, we must structure environments that encourage better thinking.

This is my job in a nutshell. As an Innovation Strategist what I do is create environments that encourage better thinking to ultimately lead to innovative ideas. Design thinking guides me on how to solve wicked problems by looking at them differently, asking stupid questions, and placing a diverse team in environments with healthy tensions that force us to question traditional thinking and each other. We design our approach intentionally to be critical of ourselves so that there are no easy answers. However, for the most part, I only get to play on a smaller scale around products and services. 

To me, the corporation is the most wicked of all design problems. Countless cases highlight the flaws of current corporate design, leaving the business world and the rest of the world crying out for a better way forward. Do I have a solution to this problem? No, not yet. However, I do know the first stupid question we need to start asking: 

Why did we make a person so drastically different from ourselves?

Too Far Ahead of the Curve

One would need an ungodly number of fingers and toes to count the times that a ground-breaking new technology has been brought to life as an inferior product and rightly, has catastrophically failed in-market. It never ceases to amaze me how many brilliant technologies are so terribly fumbled by organizations, only to be picked up by a rival and turned into a game-changing product. In the face of countless successful products that rise from the ashes of their failed predecessor, we must ask what causes so many initial launches to flop and why their later manifestations succeed?

Engineers, scientists, programmers, technologists and other analytically minded types continue to produce novel, unique and awe-inspiring inventions. Yet somewhere in the development process, it seems a change occurs in the roles of the inventor and the technology. Instead of the inventor soberly pushing development forward, guided by a grounded product definition, the technology takes on a life of its own and begins to dictate its own evolution. Developers fall in love with their products and become blinded to the true objectives and consumer needs they set out to solve. Think of the MS Tablet PC, Apple Newton, GM’s EV1 – all products that were innovative, yet became too trapped within their own mythology to create a meaningful product.

I’m as guilty as anyone; in my past life as an engineer, I often spent days working on designs that would later be scrapped when I returned to the initial problem I was trying to solve. Like death by a thousand cuts, I understand all too well how easy and addictive it can be to let a design creep away from its initial intent, feature by feature.

However, like a zombie rising from the grave to feast on the brains of the masses, many of these technologies are given a second chance when picked up by another company, often years later. In these instances, I’m reminded of the quote, “the early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese” – it takes an initial failure so that a product innovation may learn from prior mistakes and succeed.

Or does it?

With the benefit of hindsight, we can look to classic technology failures and their subsequent comebacks to see where they went wrong. The MS tablet tried to emulate a traditional PC and forced the user into specific scenarios by trying to replicate Windows in a touch environment. Apple was able to succeed because the iPad software was designed specifically for touch and was a drastically different environment from their MacOS. Apple’s Newton on the other hand, tried to replace too many features of a traditional computer instead of augment them and instead was an oversized PDA that did too many things poorly. Palm came back years later with the Pilot: a smaller, thinner, cheaper, more advanced PDA that synced well with PCs, instead of trying to replace them. Lastly, General Motor’s EV1 was an electric car from the mid-90s that had usage-limiting daily and annual mileage restrictions, long recharge times, cost far more than combustion models and could only be leased, not bought. Recent years have seen a host of electric cars – Tesla, Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, Focus Electric – that while still not massive commercial successes, are doing better due to increased range, fast recharge and decreased costs.

While some of the issues above may seem like technology limitations, at the core, all 3 examples were failures in meeting people’s needs. Apple realized that a different interface required a different operating environment. Palm understood their PDA as an extension of the computer, not a replacement. Modern electric cars don’t force a drastic behavioral change in the automobile experience. The difference in all of these examples? The companies started with, and maintained throughout, a view to what people wanted and needed.

And as simple as it sounds, this human-centric approach continues to be elusive to organizations around the world. The Segways, Google Waves, Zunes and TiVos of the world continue to hit the market. And while I’m all for the pursuit of pure science and creating technology for technology’s sake, if you are a corporation trying to sell innovative products, do not expect that the breakthrough inventions of your R&D team will be commercial hits without first aligning them with human needs rooted in behavioral insights. Instead, why not start by asking, “what can we do for people?” not simply, “what can we do?”

Designed to Evolve

Everyone loves a good come back, right? Well not me. I was the guy who rooted for the overlord, not the underdog. Drago should have beat Rockie. Apple should have been crushed by Microsoft in the 90s. Michael Vick should have stayed incarcerated. Zombies should just stay dead.

See, I’m not that impressed by comebacks because, by necessity, they require that first, there was fairly spectacular failure leading to a situation even requiring a comeback. I’m all for being open to failure – I think it’s the best way to learn – however, a comeback indicates that you hit rock bottom, which requires a lot more than just simple failure. Why should I be impressed by someone or something that loses everything?

I’m impressed by things that can stand the test of time. Granted nothing is perfect, but the longer something is able to stay relevant and intact, the more we should celebrate its creators. It used to be that to build a long-standing product, you simply had to make high quality goods that fit a consumer need and didn’t fall apart after 10 uses (the phrase, “they don’t build ‘em like they used to” comes to mind). However, in our hyperactive, ADHD infused, grass-is-always-greener culture, our expectations have become so unrealistically high that static products have little to no chance of standing the test of time.

So how can designers adapt to this warp-speed world of unattainable expectations? How can one create a product in a world where it will be near-obsolete the day it is released? The trick is, modern products can’t be static. Modern products need to evolve and much like Darwinian theory, it is the strongest and those best able to adapt that will survive.

Our generation by no means has a patent on the concept of evolving products. Concepts like versioning, service platforms and modularity have been around for decades and have guided the hands of product designers.

Versioning
The oldest trick in the software book, versioning is the assignment of unique version numbers to evolving states of code. However, this concept indicates a much larger mental state for both developer and consumer: the product is never finished. Yes, there are milestones for major releases (1.0, 2.0 and so on), however, no matter how you feel about the software at the time, there is a chance that the subsequent iteration could be a drastic improvement, change certain troubling features or make the program more useful to your day-to-day. Couple this with the past decade of connectivity and even major releases can be riddled with bugs only to be patched soon after by an x.1 version. Many developers have begun a trend of releasing living beta versions of software to indicate that it is an ongoing, evolving experiment.

Software has the benefit of minimal cost to update and adapt, making it the perfect medium for versioning. However, other forms are beginning to pick up on this evolutionary trend: the iPhone 5, Tron 2.0, the Trek 1.5 road bike, food 2.0… the list goes on. While this current misuse of product versioning may be little more than catchy marketing, the emergence of maker culture and decreasing cost of home manufacturing is making it possible for hardware developers to release product “patches” – new designs for flawed components, alternate hacks to product parts and mods to electronics to improve their operation. Try to imagine what the 2.0 version of your car looks like.

Product as a Service
Once again most notably used in the software world, this approach dates back to the early 1960s, well before the dawn of the personal computer. In a time when only a handful of mainframes existed in the world, most companies could not afford to have their own and instead used terminals to access centrally hosted business applications through time-sharing of data centers. 40 years later, this trend would re-emerge under the term Software as a Service (SaaS), as a way to save on capital costs of servers hosting large ERP systems (think Salesforce or Google Docs).

The concept works outside of the software world as well. My earliest memory of this format was signing up to Columbia House music and receiving some terrible CD-of-the-month after forgetting to return their order card. However, subscription mail-order services are still alive and well (e.g.: Birtchbox, $1 Shave Club, Frank & Oak). In addition, shared asset services like Zipcar (Autoshare, Car2Go, etc.) or citibike (bixibike, hubway, etc.) are growing in popularity as people enjoy the freedom of not having to deal with the maintenance of the things they use.

Modularity
Championed by Henry Ford at the dawn of the 20th century, the concepts of interchangeable parts, assembly line manufacturing and mass production began a new era of product design and development. Now, broken components didn’t spell the end of a product entirely, but simply a quick fix for an interchangeable piece. What’s more, the standardization of part specifications such as what IBM did with the PC in the mid-80s, allowed for the democratization of component design, leading to an infinite number of computer combinations and a constantly upgradeable product format.

Software has traditionally played in the modularity space as well, however, few digital platforms have benefited from the concept as much as the smartphone. The emergence of app stores has changed the mobile phone from a static communication device into a constantly evolving digital platform for innovation. No longer are phone adoption cycles dictated by new hardware features, but instead by their inability to run the latest and greatest apps.

Modern hardware design is giving way to modularity as well. As consumers hack and craft their own projects together, kit-based platforms such as littleBits, Arduino, Sifeo and (the grandfather of them all) lego have become the gadgetry of choice. For these products to stay relevant, one must simply buy an expansion set and a whole new world of possibilities is unveiled. Throw in a dose of online community interaction and these product evolutions no longer follow a linear path but instead diverge into an infinite number of directions for any taste and preference