I remember...

I remember not being connected.

I remember not hearing a ping every 30 seconds, conversations without distractions and paying attention to those in my physical presence.

I remember silence. 

I remember getting lost and being found, making plans to have friends around. I remember trivial arguments that lasted hours and learning - not through Google, but through literary scours.

I remember exploration.

I remember socializing over food instead of feeds, and falling in love in a room instead of through my profile’s needs. I remember buying a girl a drink, instead of sending her a wink; spending an evening making eyes instead of drunk-texting late at night.

I remember love.

I remember life being so much simpler when my phone didn’t let out a whimper that fueled my anxious temper and pushed me towards the edge. I remember sleeping through the night, not a digital thing in sight, or a buzz or blinking light, that may not actually be there.

I remember relaxation.

I remember a different age, less advanced but less depraved, when the whole world was still a stage, but we didn’t tweet our lines. I remember silence and exploration, love and relaxation, and in a time where we weren’t connected, I felt more in touch with myself.

I remember not being connected.

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.

Death and Rebirth of the Music Industry

The old-crown of the music industry are currently on their knees and may I be one of many to say, it’s about bloody well time. These relics of a bygone era have held back the industry for decades from both a creative standpoint and in terms of technological innovation. Struggling to cling onto outdated business models and pop-star formulas, the only thing surprising to most people about the downfall of the industry is that some major labels have managed to stay afloat this long. Still, it’ll only take a few more dead rockstars (looking in your direction Mr. Jagger) or pop-star breakdowns (I actually have a betting pool going on when Justin Bieber will be found playing with Tonka trucks in mountains of coke) to really hit the P&L of the remaining labels and ultimately have their parent companies cut the umbilical cord.

However, what is rising from the ashes of the old industry is an open, exciting and creative new world. Traditional genres have been blended and segmented to the point that they are barely even recognizable and while I’ll admit that the new fragmented music scene has produced a lot of crap, this type of experimentation has also stumbled upon musical genius. It’s a game of numbers now and if you’re patient enough to spend the time to dig through a lot of independent music, you’ll eventually turn up some amazing artists.

Incredibly, I would argue that this shift was brought about by 2 key technologies: mp3s and digital recorders. The first was used as a tool to tear down the foundations of a long-standing oligopoly on musical creativity. The second opened the doors to a creation of new music the likes of which has never been seen, in volume or diversity.

Sometimes you’ve got to destroy…

It’s the late 90s and the music industry is riding high. Labels are making unheard of profits and shipping roughly a billion albums per year. Who could blame them for wanting to cling onto their beautiful little nest egg? However, we all know that one of the few constants in life is change.

Suddenly new software allows individuals to rip CDs and create what many would herald to be the beginning of the end: mp3s. The Napster generation emerges and over a 10 year timespan from 1999 to 2009, revenue from music sales would be cut roughly in half. While I’m all for open sharing of music and creativity, I’m not one of those people who is naïve enough to think that piracy didn’t contribute to this shift in a big way, however, digital sharing of music was only half the tale of the downfall of the music industry.

The other half of this downfall came through an enabling of the way people actually wanted to consume their music. When Apple launched the iTunes store in 2003, soon followed the ability to download singles instead of albums. Low and behold, over the subsequent 5 years, single sales would skyrocket. This wasn’t a consumer base that didn’t want to buy music; they simply didn’t want to buy crap music. Long gone were the days of bands and listeners who believed in the album and at last, a technology existed – the mp3 – to shift the perception of recordings away from albums and towards singles. Listeners no longer had to shell out $20 for an album to hear 1 or 2 tracks they liked. This was yet another nail in the coffin for the big labels.

…in order to rebuild.

So, suddenly we find ourselves in a professional musical environment that is dying; rock stars don’t rock hard enough anymore and pop stars just don’t pop. Label after label begins to fail. The big six have been whittled down to the big three and I’m taking bets on who will go next. Was this the end of music as we know it? Were Don McLean’s lyrics even more prophetic than I already think them and did “American Pie” actually have nothing to do with a crashing plane and everything to do with a crashing industry?

No, that would be complete nonsense. Until a totalitarian regime is in place to moderate and control every aspect of our lives and deny us the very right to be ourselves, there will be music. It is simply too engrained within our society as a medium of expression, storytelling and enabling our most important evolutionary purpose: sex (thank you Isaac Hayes).

In fact, the music industry is more alive now than ever before; it just isn’t very profitable for 80 year old relic companies. The second technology I mentioned – digital recorders – have made sure of this. Digital recording has reduced the cost of capturing and creating music to such a point where nearly anyone with a few bucks and the desire to do so can write, record and release a song (note that talent was not a requirement mentioned in that previous list). Coupled with our good friends the mp3 and the internet and you suddenly have a distribution channel for your music, at a fraction of the costs needed to create music before the digital revolution.

The result, for better or for worse, has been a democratization of the music industry. It is rebuilding as a space where we are no longer told by a handful of labels what to listen to, but instead may cast our nets wide and find the most unique forms of music that appeal to our individual tastes. Pirate metal, nintendocore, chap hop, lowercase (it’s silence…just silence), crunkcore, speed reggae; if you can think of it, there is now both a porn and a musical genre for it.

I, for one, love the new music industry. As a passionate fanatic, I love nothing more than stumbling across obscure new music that I dig. However, I realize that not everyone is willing to spend hours scouring the web for their next musical. The next major hurdle the industry has is how to filter and recommend music to match consumer tastes, however, that’s another story for another technology and another time.

What matters now is that you - as a listener, musician or industry player - recognize the current state of the music industry and adapt appropriately. It has been destroyed and we are in the process of rebuilding it. You can either sit back and complain about this fact, or get involved in shaping where the future of music is headed.

Whatever you do, don’t blame the mp3 for destroying the music industry; it also may be the thing that saved it.

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?”

Paging Doctor R2

Co-Authored by Paul Hartley

It is undeniable that technology-enabled devices have had a great impact upon our ability to diagnose, treat and care for the sick and infirm. However, we must be cautious to not get caught up in the flashing lights, bells, whistles and web-integrated gadgetry of it all. Many people have a dangerous penchant for placing unwavering faith in technology and, in the case of medical devices, this kind of blind trust can lead to great harm. At times, it is crucial to ground our confidence in technology to remind us – particularly in a field so vital to us as health – what these devices are and are not capable of.

What can technology do?

Fundamentally, any piece of technology is created to accomplish a particular task that, given unlimited time and resources, a human could accomplish. The most important thing we gain from assigning work to a device is speed—a machine can simply do many things faster that we can. However, beyond speed, we also gain a way to reliably do a task over and over again. Repeatability, or the successful execution of the same task, is the other major benefit of technology integration.

However, there is an important differentiation between what technology can do and how we use it. What something does is defined by the target goal inherent to the task it has been created to accomplish – in the case of most health technologies: increase speed and repeatability. What we use the technology for is a broader matter pertaining to how the technology integrates and plays a role in a much larger diagnostic process. In the case of health and medicine, technology use can be seen as falling into a number of high-level categories:

• Expand The Senses: An augmentation or enhancement of basic human senses to allow for more detailed, thorough or less harmful inspection of the human body.
• Communicate Information: Methods for transferring information quickly and seamlessly between points to allow for remote patient diagnosis, collaborative analysis and multi-device clustering.
• Redistribute Responsibility: Shifting medical actions between doctor, patient and device to increase control of the process by the patient and free up valuable time of medical professionals.
• Accurate, Consistent Data Collection: The tracking of reliable data at regular intervals to improve the quantity and quality of information used in the input of diagnosis, ensuring a better picture of an individual’s health.
• Data Analysis & Prediction: Processing large amounts of aggregate health data across multiple users to spot trends and patterns within large populations and improve the accuracy of personalized diagnoses.
• Active Intervention & Treatment: Integrated with data collection and analysis, these technologies play an active hand in treating and influencing the human body through continuous feedback loops.

What can’t technology do…yet?

Yet as powerful as the technologies that live in the above list are, it is essential to understand the limitations of our current technology for two key reasons.

First, we must understand the limits of the trust we should currently place in medical devices. Just because we are capable of creating technology that can perform a task does not always mean that we should. Creating technology for technology’s sake may be well and good in the realm of gadgets and games, however, with a subject as critical as medicine, we must ensure that our technology solution is truly superior to old ways and does not create more problems than it solves.

Second, it is essential to understand the limitations of our technology so that we know where to go next. Without knowing what stands in our way, we will never know how to get around it. As it stands, here are what we see as three of the greatest challenges we must overcome to push the envelope of medical technology:

Adaptation to Unique Scenarios: Current technology is effective because it is usually designed to do one or two things: search for patterns and give basic responses. This is a very binary approach to technology that works for our current state of technological infancy. To progress to a state where our devices can adapt to unique scenarios and deal with outliers in addition to the mainstream, we need two key things: smarter AI and more data. As software intelligence grows in complexity, it will learn to decipher more difficult problems, but in order to learn, this AI will need vast amounts of data to build an understanding of the different scenarios it could encounter in order to interpolate and extrapolate upon existing knowledge and deal with each unique case.

Holistic, Integrated Bodily Monitoring: Part of treating each unique case will come down to recognizing that the human body can not be treated in isolation. It is a vast, interconnected system and for devices to improve diagnosis and treatment, they must understand a holistic view of who we are. In addition to preventing catastrophes due to unwanted side-effects of certain treatments, collecting more data points on our bodies on a consistent basis will provide insights into the body that have never been seen in the medical community. To reach this state, we need a simultaneous improvement in our sensing, communication and multi-variable analysis capabilities.

Emotions and the Mind: Perhaps the holy grail of holistic monitoring would be to access the knowledge and mysteries stored in the human mind. Generations of medical professionals, philosophers and leaders have alluded to the interconnectedness of body and mind. As such, if we aspire to create a robotic doctor, we first need to have the technological capability to analyze and understand the human body as well as the mind. Interestingly, this is less a technology problem and more concern of psychology and biology. Our current understanding of the human brain is juvenile in the grand scheme of its complexity and many of our current remedies for ailments of the mind are based theories, intuitions and an intangible human connection. Before we can hand such great responsibility to a machine, we must be certain in our comprehension of the mind and leave nothing to guesswork. While we have no doubt that artificial intelligence will one day achieve sentience, we question whether a robot will ever be able to develop a gut; hunches and intuitions simply don’t mesh well with circuits.

Traveling Without Moving

At the tender age of 30 (the new 20?), I’ve had the opportunity to travel more than generations prior could have ever dreamed (I’m two continents short of the full set). My parent’s generation, while definitively embracing the ability to travel, still lacked the speed, ease and affordability of travel options that exist today. Increasing globalization has opened up borders and options for travel that have never existed before.

However, could my generation be the peak of global travel?

As communication technologies become more ubiquitous and lifelike, we are starting to see a decreased need for individuals to travel the world. Even in the face of reduced travel costs and relaxed political regulation, it is often difficult to justify a trip when so many global interactions can be experienced from the comfort of your own desk. Unquestionably, there will always be a demand to see the sunset past the Eiffel tower with your own eyes, to smell the air at the Cape of Good Hope or to hear the echo off the inside of the Taj Mahal. People will always have a desire to explore, adventure and to see the world.

But what of more mundane travel? What of long business flights? What of lonely hotel rooms? What of expensive travel per diems?

I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting in a Cisco Tele-presence room. While the experience wasn’t quite up to the promise of fooling me into standing to shake the client’s hand at the end, the technology was impressive and left very little lacking in the way of non-verbal communication (which, as you know, I went on a bit of a rant about recently). Was this experience as good as a face-to-face meeting? No. However, it provided a close enough approximation at a fraction of the cost. More importantly, the cost is steadily decreasing and the technology is rapidly improving (hell, we’ve almost caught up to Star Trek).

Yet what of the leisure traveler? Will there always be a demand for people who want to experience culture first hand? In a word (or four), yes, but decreasingly so.

Globalization, while bringing the world’s population closer together than ever before, has had a reverse effect on our need to explore the planet. Whereas previous generations had to travel to Japan (or the most exclusive, expensive restaurants) to sample sushi, our generation buys $8.99 lunch special bento boxes two doors down. Culture, food, music, art, sport, design… even people… have spread so rapidly and ubiquitously around the world that we no longer need to travel in order to experience other societies; we simply walk 10 blocks. If this trend continues, then soon we will live in an era where the planet is one big societal melting pot that speaks English and Mandarin (flies in renegade spaceships, lives as outlaws and runs from oppressive governments and crazed space-monster humans).

Google is not without blame for our increasingly sedentary lives either. The Web has afforded us near instantaneous access to a vast bank of knowledge and a platform for global communication. It used to be that to find out what the Blarney Stone tasted like, you’d have to get over to Cork and kiss it yourself. Now, one can read hundreds of in-depth reviews describing the texture, look, sounds, smells, tastes of the stone and likely even a recipe or two for someone’s Blarney Stone soup. If you think I’m exaggerating both the level of fidelity and the coverage of information that Google provides, why not take a brief trip to the Antarctic?

Me, I’m a bit of a puritan. I believe that to truly appreciate a culture, one must immerse themselves in it and experience it first-hand. However, not everyone is like me. Some people are happy with pictures of the Pyramids. Many argue that the best curry in the world exists around the corner from their place. Certain individuals may even prefer to program their treadmill to simulate the Great Wall instead of visiting it themselves.

However, to everyone else, I implore you:

Go out and see the world before it comes to you.

Do I Have to Go to Work Today?

The frightening thing is that increasingly, the answer is becoming ‘no.’ With more and more people working from home each year, taking flex hours and even basing out of a home office… there may very soon be a day when the answer to this question is no.

I recently read an article through CNN that talked about the office of tomorrow. It was a very visual piece that showed 3D renderings of an office in 2022.  Common place where items such as hologram tables, 3-D printers and even office windows which doubled as computer screens (though this one may be a lot closer than 10 years away). The article showed what kind of technologies are coming up the pipelines and set to be in place in the business world in 10 years. However, even this article acknowledges that there is a massive assumption precluding the entire piece: that you will even be working in an office in 10 years.

In my recent job hunt, I have already stumbled across full-time positions that list their location as “virtual.” These are not simply jobs where flex time or working from home is permitted, or even jobs based in a city where positions such as sales and support are mostly on the road. Increasingly, coders, consultants, writers, graphic designers and anyone else who doesn’t really need a place to call ‘work’ are being hired from locations across the globe. Particularly in cases where the majority of an employee’s work is done on the computer, meetings are held over Skype and documents are shared through the cloud, does it really make a difference if your co-worker is down the hall or across the globe?

Instead, what I would really wish to have seen out of the CNN article is forecast technologies to support the increasing trend of home workers. The snowballing power of mobile technology is encouraging (and I always loved the quote about Nasa and Angry Birds), however where will this technology lead us in 10 years? Will desks be obsolete? Will we see living spaces better designed to handle work flow?  Will we see home innovations that are able to replicate more of the functions of the office such as white boarding, co-worker socializing, getting fired (though George Clooney may have already proved that one a bad idea) and even frowned up on business activities such as cheating on your partner with your secretary.

Are we moving towards an era where those massive, brilliant buildings that scatter and inspire our cityscapes become obsolete?

It seems there will always be an argument for some form of in-person collaboration. A few years ago, I read the book Blind Faith by Ben Elton.  While the book was nothing more than a futuristic, sexual-tech-theology adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 (yes, I’m equally confused by my own description), it did raise a few interesting points. The book was set in an oppressive future where digital sharing of information had become all-encompassing and individuals could no longer have independent secrets or personal lives. With the pervasiveness of the online life, everyone with an office job worked from home. However, due to growing social dysfunction, fizzy coffs (visits to physical offices) were made mandatory to encourage people to get out of the house and interact in a face-to-face manner.

So perhaps the question shouldn’t be, ‘do I have to go to work today?’  Instead, we should be asking what is the right balance of office work, work from home and travel. Also, if I do end up working entirely from home, how can I be expected to riddle my coworkers with nerf darts?

…Never mind.