Why, How and Why Not?

As children, we are always questioning people. As we grow older, we question less and less and accept more.  Corinne Miller, suggests that this may be because of the perception that asking questions is a sign weakness and describes how we can change this.

“What’s your favorite question? Over the years we’ve found that the most popular answers to this question are ‘why,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why not’ in that order. A trend we’ve also observed is that those who ask ‘why’ are typically more holistic or whole-brained thinkers, those who ask ‘how’ are typically more box thinkers, and those who ask ‘why not’ are typically the challenging thinkers. All types, of course, are equally valuable and equally required for innovation!”

Questions stimulate the brain! Questions use verbs and words that activate key areas of the brain that, in turn, increase the volume and variety of questions. The more questions, the more creativity and innovation. We like to say that questions open the innovation pipeline.

This article questions why people do not question and suggest ways of changing this.

• Why as you become older, we question less and less?
• How do we build questioning into a part of  business culture?
• Four steps in developing question banks - identifying, collecting, organizing and refining

One of the habits I am trying to develop among our interns and students is to keep a log of the following activities.

1. A question log
2. A learning log (things that they learn on a daily basis)
3. An idea log

I personally use a personally wiki for this. After reading this article, we may want to extend the wiki to act as a question bank for each project.

LinkLog: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

I have been a regular watcher of videos on TED Talks.  It is one of the most inspiring channels of information.  If you like the talks, you can help them spread.

Links: Emerging Technologies and Innovation

I enjoy reading about how technology enables innovative solutions. Here are a list of some interesting links

E-textiles to Monitor Your Health 

Virginia Tech (VT) researchers have been busy developing efficient e-textiles — electronic textiles and clothing with embedded wires and sensors — for six years now. Their computerized clothing can monitor your movements, sensing if you’re walking, running, standing, or sitting down.

Bridge Traffic Powers Its Monitoring Sensors

Researchers at Clarkson University, NY, have developed wireless bridge sensors which work without batteries. Instead, they are powered by the vibrations caused by passing traffic. This is good news for all the people in charge of maintaining bridges, who will no longer to have to replace batteries installed in hard-to-access locations.

Self-powered Nanowires

Many research teams around the world are building nanodevices of some kind. But these very small devices need very small sources of power to be fully functional. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have shown that a single nanowire can produce power by harvesting mechanical energy from its environment. ‘Made of piezoelectric material, the nanowire generates a voltage when mechanically deformed.’

Explore Interestingness

An amazing find while I was exploring Flickr

Solve the meta-problem

I keep getting links to cool articles, blogs and essays. Sometimes I just mark them to read later. Some times I just dive in, sample them a bit. What excites me, may not excite you. But if you are in the software industry and share some of my interests, you may just want to take a look.

My sources of essays are links on Digg, doggdotus, slashdot, reddit. There is a bit of overlap there (doggdotus is an aggregator of digg, slashdot and del.icio.us). Here is an essay that got me started for the day.

How To: Be More Productive

Aaron is accomplished. Long before I read anything he wrote, I knew him for his software contributions. He describes himself as an Activist, Writer and Hacker. I knew about reddit and web.py and his contributions to semantic web and Python communities. I recently started reading his Raw Thought

This blog post is a gem. Like many other posts of his, it makes you reflect. If you are a software developer/software entrepreneur you can relate to this essay . For me, there is one thing that stands out more than anything else:

Another way to make things more fun is to solve the meta-problem. Instead of building a web application, try building a web application framework with this as the example app. Not only will the task be more enjoyable, but the result will probably be more useful.

Yeah. That is what it is all about. If you are a software developer, you can be an order of magnitude more productive, if you can take the approach of solving a meta problem. Some times this method of solving produces a tool. Some times it produces a design pattern or a framework. But almost, always, it produces one of the most elegant, reusable solutions.

Here are a few meta problems and the solutions that software pioneers invented. Some times they are so beautiful, you are sit in amazement at the mind that created them.

• Parse different formats - Build a way to describe a parser and build a parser-generator (lex/yacc)
• Find a way to describe a database - Recursive use of the concept of relationship to describe themselves. The metadata in an RDB are just tables like any other (with some special privileges)
• You need a way to build different markups - Build a makup meta language (like XML)
• You need to describe a set of resources and relationships and make statements about them - Create RDF/RDFS

Need I say more?

Social Spaces and Creativity

I was born in a city and lived my life in some of the most crowded cities in the world - Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Bombay, New York. About 10 years ago I moved to the Silicon Valley and now spend my time between the Bay area and bustling (almost bursting) Chennai.

I know I like cities in spite of all the congestion and problems. But I never knew why. That is, till I read this eloquent piece  on  The Laws of Urban Energy.

while technology may give us each the tools of creativity, it takes urban proximity and unpredictability to sharpen them.

The potential edge that urban dwellers enjoy over their country cousins can be linked to having more and different people to meet, and more meeting places—parks, coffee shops, parties, or simply the sidewalk

“diversity” means not necessarily ethnicity, race, or religion, but a range of perspectives and skill sets that intersect to create what he calls “superadditivity”—problem-solving power that is more than the sum of its parts.

In order to get the intellectual benefits of diversity, you first have to actually talk to a wide variety of people. 

 

Some industries depend much more on face-to-face knowledge than others. In quantitative analysis of economic data, for example, the relevant knowledge can be printed in a manual, meaning firms and skilled workers can be located anywhere, according to economists Michael Storper and Anthony Venables. But being on the scene is important when it comes to buzz industries—”culture, politics, arts, academia, new technologies, and advanced finance”—in other words, everything people discuss in a wine bar in Tribeca on a Saturday night.

  

Driving Innovation

From Finding the Sweet Spot: A New Way to Drive Innovation

“Getting the customer insight at a profound level is enormously important and building the capability and skills to do that is enormously important.”

What you really want to understand is one consumer in terms of mind, body, soul and task. Map a holistic experience and spend 12 hours with one consumer spent over a one-month period [instead of] running 50 focus groups where you have eight minutes with an individual consumer…

To really have the concept process and the innovation process, [you should] be very informed by the financials on an innovation. Most companies go and invent things, and then at the end figure out, “How am I going to price it?”

What we do is really work against a major three-step process which is, number one, let’s make sure on the front end that we’re asking the right questions; second, once we’re asking the right questions, how do we dig deep into the consumer, as I’ve just described to you; and then third, once we’ve dug deep into the consumer, how do we put together the concepts and technologies that are going to solve the problem?

How do I begin to ask right questions? One of the most important parts of creating big growth is asking new questions, asking the right questions, because most people operate in very rote ways about how they do things. Think of it as an environment and studio where it’s very inquiry driven, and you’re building in-depth knowledge, and you have all the creative tools to quickly formulate these things.

It’s all about superior insights and intellect. It’s not all about money and scale. It’s knowledge driven and connections driven. To me, creativity is about connecting things. People sometimes confuse creativity and innovation. It’s really about having deep insights and connecting them: the consumer, the technology.

Larry Huston was the architect of its Connect + Develop program at Proctor & Gamble. If you have anything to do with building products, this interview is a great read and some of his insights are invaluable.

Thanks to Dr. Peter Troxler who pointed out this article in the Gurteen Knowledge Forum.

Links: Interaction Design Patterns

Interaction Design Patterns for web development is probably one of the most useful resources for application developers. We already see many of these patterns in applications today. I am really thankful to Martijn van Welie, for taking the effort to list these patterns and document them in such a high quality blog list.

This is such a wonderful effort to take each pattern, describe it and identify implementations and usability information. For example, look at Accordion Pattern which includes very useful notes on Thoughts on Usability. In addition to a nice categorization list, there are good links to resources and code for implementation. Found the following links to interaction design patterns from this site.

• Interaction Design Patterns for Games
  
• User Interface Design Patterns - Course Notes
• Ubicomp Design Patterns from Berkeley
  

The overall goal of this work is to aid practice by speeding up the diffusion of new interaction techniques and evaluation results from researchers, presenting the information in a form more palatable and usable to practicing designers. Towards this end, we have developed an initial and emerging pattern language for ubiquitous computing, consisting of 45 pre-patterns describing application genres, physical-virtual spaces, interaction and systems techniques for managing privacy, and techniques for fluid interactions.

It will be nice to see the following additions. This can be actually built from inputs by the community.

• A tag map based on interaction-idioms
• A tag map or feature-matrix (like the mashup matrix) based on products where these patterns are used.

Simple Innovations: The Small, the Personal, and the Intimate

From TED Profile of Paul Bennett :

design need not invoke grand gestures or sweeping statements to be successful, but instead can focus on the little things in life, the obvious, the overlooked

“Small is the new big,”Bennett says. And his design approach reflects this philosophy. For often, it’s not the biggest ideas that have the most impact, but the small, the personal, and the intimate.

Paul shares several such innovations in this video, a talk given at TED

Little Innovations: Math Lab in Your Cell Phone

From ZDNet’s Emerging Technology Trends

Israeli scientists have decided to put a math lab in your pocket. They developed a library of math modules which can be installed on almost cell phones available today. So you’ll be able to see graphs or solve equations on your phone while on a train or a bus ride. You’ll also be able to send graphs or formulas by SMS to other students — and to send the results of your exercises to your teacher.

This may just be the beginning. With cameras, ability to play flash, SMS and GPRS, these may become the new devices for augmenting learning.