Legos and Innovation - Self-building machines

(the dangers of saving a draft - this was written in January 2007, but fell down into the 'draft dungeon' until I uncovered it again today. Still highly relevant, so here we go!)

By now readers may have realized that I have tendrils out in every direction I can manage (quite a few), and so when something like this (hold on a sec) comes along my radar, it just sets my spine tingling... another personal tipping point and interesting confluence of events and information have come my way.

Some background - in early 2006 I happened to sit in on a 'speed' presentation session (10 minutes to present, 5 minutes Q&A) that Sarah Bloomer (at the time with The Mathworks locally, and since, back into the consulting world) gave on such topics as Daniel Pink's 'A Whole New Mind' (great book! and had been on my reading list, but she tipped me over to actually reading it), a workshop session around 'Serious Play' and LEGO that had been part of the DMI (Design Management Institute) Conference in late 2005 that she had attended (here in Boston - sadly I wasn't aware of it until a month after it had passed through town), and a number of very interesting items around the idea that Design (and User Experience [or UX as it's known]) has become far more important and prevalent in modern life.

For this gathering of Usability Professionals assembled (this was a 'mini' one-day conference by UPA [the Usability Professionals Association] which The Mathworks was hosting) the idea was that Design and UX should be paid more attention to and actively participated in. Rather than act as diagnostic technicians, the call (my takeaway at least) was to be involved in the entire usability and design lifecycle, not just at the end, or even just upfront (preventing damage in the first place).

Fast-forward...

Later in the year, I participated in a one-day session (Bringing User-Centered Design Practices into Agile Development Projects) at Jared Spool's conference in Cambridge, MA (mentioned previously), on Agile Development meets Usability (essentially). Agile Thinking has been bouncing around in my head for years now, and I've been an informal practitioner in both coding work, and other work/life, but I wanted to experience a dive by an Agile authority - in this case, Jeff Sutton Patton (thanks for the correction Jared!) of Thoughtworks (a well-known Agile firm). Extremely interesting, helped to further cement some usability concepts for me, as well as agile concepts, and how they might work together, and some great prototype and facilitation ideas came out of it.

Pause...

Now all along, I've also been doing a ton of research into Innovation, who is doing it, how do they do it, why do they do it (or more likely WHY NOT?), what is the role of R&D these days - is it backroom, coming directly from customers, participation WITH customers, etc.), and so on.

Suffice it to say, I've had hundreds of conversations (thanks largely to LinkedIn), read dozens and dozens of the classic and modern innovation books, recorded five or six innovation-related (directly related - it's all tangentially related in the end) podcasts, and found software vendors in this space (innovation-oriented software) that I had never known existed. Ironically, they have been buried in 'innovation silos' - whereas many of them are using techniques that we have seen in use in a more horizontal sense (such as collaboration software, enterprise search, discovery-oriented solutions, portals, workflow, and the like) over at least the nearly 13 years I had been with Delphi Group.

And this has what to do with Legos?

So, as a further teaser into the world of innovation, take a peek at this YouTube clip - involving one heck of a collection of LEGO Mindstorms (not the new version), assembled into a Henry Ford style assembly line - with the added twist that these are LEGOS building LEGOS (not quite a direct nanotech analog, with nanobots that literally assemble up bots and other materials from raw materials, but close enough!). It's a bit slow, sadly YouTube does not have a fast-forward capability and you'd have to manually move the video along, but wow, what a lot of patience and planning went into this creation, eh?

Now... who cares?

One, think of the work that went into creating this Lego Factory - two, here we are witnessing another recent innovation, YouTube, at work, enabling me (and you, and tens of thousands as of this writing) to view the work in the first place - three, I'd actually stumbled onto this clip via a Google Group on Prediction Markets (mentioned quite a bit in the book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' by James Surowiecki), and a fellow who is deeply embedded in Nanotechnology (an innovation that is both farther and nearer than you might expect), who happened to be talking about economic models in general, and for nanotech specifically. Whew.

Thanks to the innovations already mentioned, clearly the web, LinkedIn, Amazon, and that wonder of all innovations, caffeine (or it's powerful brethren - alcohol, but not on the job of course!) - can you see what a minor miracle that any of this information can be had, let alone connected together into a larger context? Enterprises in their internal information systems continue to have major silos, no ability to cross-link or embed content with easy re-use, and for customer-facing web properties, most companies/organizations continue to believe in a one-way, controlled (in theory) message to the world. The tools 'out there' are blowing right past the tools 'in here' and the disconnects betwixt and between just aren't going to last all that much longer.

My primary point here, is that innovation is happening all around us, in many contexts, and in the recombination of contexts into something new, or if not new, sufficiently different as to be new to us and a rippling pond of people in our respective communities. Innovation is what you make it, from the very small to the very large - embrace it, do it continuously, and lather, rinse, repeat. To be innovative, I believe you absolutely have to cast a wide net, consuming information, and seeking to make the connections within the information, ideas, etc. that your net catches as you pull it back in.

More on this front shortly - I'm brewing over with things to talk about in innovation!

Edit note: 11/19/2007 - corrected Jeff's last name, and added link to the session description

Comments

[Jared M. Spool]

Great post!

(For the record, I think you meant to say Jeff Patton, who spoke at UI11 on Designing in an Agile environment.)

The factory video is very cool.

- Jared

[Dan Keldsen]

Jared - whoops, thanks for the catch, will correct that, and add a link to the session. Hadn't realized you kept the old listings around.

[Steve mandzik]

I love the comparison of the tools "out there" and "in here", especially the way business are handling this. Personally, it brings my fun tools at home into the workplace. Not to mention all of the money it can save and innovation they can bring into the workplace.

I will have to use that in my next post, thx!

[Dan Keldsen]

Steve - thanks for stopping by, and for your comments. Stay tuned for more on the inside/outside, and Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0 front...

[Ben Tremblay]

A matter of revisiting to see for the first time?

When folk were oohing and awwing at a computing device built tinker-toy style (wooden hubs with equally wooden rods, yes?) I could but recall when I'd built a database in the mid-70s that consisted of cards with holes punched along their edge, sorted with knitting needles, no less ... my introduction to taxonomy and information systems.

What comes to mind just now is the huge amount of information that isn't made discoverable with conventional CMS, and the ocean of data that seems to plug every pipeline, turning each one into yet another silo.

"Information is data that makes a difference" ... I'm going with that ... but find myself going against the grain: seems to me the iron law of capital favours fun stuff like YouTube rather than the heavy lifting entailed by such as evidence-based decision-making, where a good honest 80% effort gets 20% of the attention.

[Dan Keldsen]

Hi Ben - fascinating example. And since I haven't had the chance to teach a taxonomy class in a few months now, had forgotten about such a system of classification as an example.

Any pictures/photos we could use as an example here? (I'll fire up a separate post)

And yes, the current Web 2.0 "bubble" (no, not quite the glory days of the late 90s, but definitely an echo, eh?) does seem to favor entertainment over "getting something useful done" - although maybe *some* discourse comes about from the conversationally inclined in these systems?